How should I enter values on a budget in gnucash ?

[lejohnston]

Geert,

I have changed my opinion about how the figures should be entered. Essentially they are budgeting to transfer $100 from checking to credit card. Therefore both numbers should be entered as negatives. This would still balance in the budget but shows money leaving the checking account (an Asset) and moving to the credit card (a Liability).

I did this in a new 'test' file and got the result I expected in the Budget itself. That is I ended up with a balanced budget.

I am attaching two word files of screen captures of the Budget Balance Sheet Report. The first is before I made the -$100 entries in the Budget and the second is after making the entries.

The first report makes sense. It shows all values as zero.

The second report is confusing. It shows Allocated Assets as:$(100). Which makes sense.

It shows Unallocated Assets as: $200. Which I don't understand. Where did these assets come from, I only budgeted to move funds from one account to another.

Total Assets shows as $100. Which I guess makes sense if you actually had $200 of Unallocated Assets.

New Liabilities shows as: $100. Is that the correct representation. Maybe. If Liabilities are normally displayed as $(100). Then the fact that we are budgeting to move $100 to a Liability Account would mean it should display as a positive value.

In that case Total Liabilities of $100 also makes sense.

Equity shows no increase in Equity which makes sense since we only transferred money from one account to another.

Total Liabilities and Equity shows as: $100. I have no idea what this means.

I don't know if this exercise helps clarify anything for anyone else. I am confused.

Also as I said in an earlier post, I don't understand the purpose of using a budget in the manner the original poster proposes.

If they are simply paying off their Credit Card, there is no reason to budget the transfer from one account to the other (that I can think of).

If they had a balance on their credit card before the beginning the budgeting period and were budgeting $100 to pay down part or all of that Liability then IMO they only need to budget $100 to their Credit Card Account

HTH,

Larry




On 03/03/17 10:41 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op vrijdag 3 maart 2017 19:15:40 CET schreef Larry:
> > Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Tab® S
> > 
> > -------- Original message --------
> > From: Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
> > Date: 2017-03-03 02:30 (GMT-08:00)
> > To: lejohnston <lejohnston at dccnet.com>
> > Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > Subject: Re: How should I enter values on a budget in gnucash ?
> > 
> > Op woensdag 1 maart 2017 13:13:33 CET schreef lejohnston:
> > > Geert,
> > > 
> > > I have gone back and made entries in a test file.
> > > 
> > > First to you question of how to enter the scenerio in the budget: I think
> > > both should be positive numbers. The Asset would then cancel the
> > > Liability.
> > 
> > How do you come to this conclusion ?
> > 
> > My budget balances if I do it this way, which is what I expect it should do.
> 
> A fair conclusion unless it's the code that calculates the totals that's using 
> the wrong sign assumptions. That's what I'm wondering about.
> 
> Geert
>
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