How should I enter values on a budget in gnucash ?

[David T.]

> On Mar 1, 2017, at 3:30 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Background of my question: recently someone proposed a fix for the gnucash 
> budget balance sheet report [1] because it was showing incorrect values 
> (according to the poster).
> 
> As budgetting is an area of gnucash I'm not at all familiar with all, I'm 
> having trouble estimating whether the patch submitter really did discover a 
> bug and the fix is valid, or whether he is using the budget feature 
> incorrectly.
> 
> My question is simply this:
> I want to budget a repayment of a credit card (from my bank account).
> 
> How should I enter this in a budget:
> Bank: 100.00-
> Credit card: 100.00-
> 
> Or
> Bank: 100.00-
> Credit card: 100.00(+)
> 
> I would expect the latter as I think transactions need to balance. However the 
> other person expects the former.
> 
> I've read the gnucash documentation which is unfortunately not showing any 
> example or detail in this regard.
> 
> In addition there's an outstanding bug report [2] with the exact same request, 
> so answering this here, would solve two problems at once :)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Geert
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/120
> [2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689754
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Geert,

I’ll begin by saying I may misunderstand the original problem, but when I look at the Budget Balance report, I frankly think that it is screwed up in more significant ways than how it represents liabilities.

As to the original problem, I think there is a disconnect between how the budget features operate, and how the rest of the application operates, which the bug hints at. In reference to the comments on the pull request, I turned off Preferences->Reverse Signs, and looked at the results of both the CoA and Budget info. What I noticed: the Budget values *don’t* change with the preference, but the report and the CoA *do* change. In other words, if I change the preference to reverse Income & Expense accounts, the CoA reflects this (i.e, they both display as positive values), but the values in the budget seemingly remain as originally calculated, with negative values. I am not clear on what exactly is happening, because the report seems to still work, even though the budget numbers retain their original values. If I recalculate the budget numbers, however, they take on (and keep) the current signs. The report continues to behave consistently, regardless of the sign displayed in the budget. So, it is not clear whether one should enter a negative value (reduce the liability by entering a negative number in the budget) or a positive one.

So, it seems to me that it is perhaps very understandable that a user would receive confusing results. It is not clear to me what the resolution is, except to say that the current situation is highly confusing.

Be all that as it may, the report itself is fundamentally troubling for me. For starters, which accounts is it including, and for what purpose? When I run this report, I get a listing of every account in my file—regardless of whether accounts are hidden, empty, zero balance, or part of the budget. It would seem to me that the Budget Balance Sheet would only include accounts that the user has designated in the underlying budget. This is not helped by the fact that the options to exclude zero balance/zero value accounts doesn’t seem to work.

Next, it is very difficult to determine that this report apparently is tallying up the numbers from the budget entries. At least, based on the liability account that I was using to examine this bug’s behavior, that’s what it seems to do. I don’t know for sure, however, because none of the other numbers seem to match from the budget the the report. Confusing the matter is the fact that values turn up for accounts without budget numbers—in my case, the report includes commodity holdings info, even though they are not part of the budget. So, it is anyone’s guess what the report actually includes.

David