How should I enter values on a budget in gnucash ?

[Geert Janssens]

Edward,

Thanks for the detailed summary of your tests. I have created a bug report based on this:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780717

Further discussion can take place there if needed.

Regards,

Geert

On woensdag 8 maart 2017 09:30:25 CEST Edward Doolittle wrote:


I had a chance to spend a few minutes with the budget module, to try to make sense of the 
signs. First, Here's what I expect: With Edit -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Reverse Balanced 
accounts set to "None", I would expect positive values in the budget to correspond to debits. 
With Edit -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Reverse Balanced accounts set to "Credit accounts", I 
would expect positive values in Assets and Expenses to correspond to debits, and positive 
values in Equity, Income, and Liabilities to correspond to credits. What actually happens: The 
budget module appears to be insensitive to the Reversed Balanced accounts setting. However, 
its operation does correspond to "reverse credit accounts"; to be specific, positive amounts 
entered into Assets or Expenses correspond to debits, and positive values in Income or 
Liabilities correspond to credits. (See attached screen shot, in which (for the first six months of 
the budget I chose a pair of account types and entered +100 into the corresponding spaces in 
the budget. You can see that +100 corresponds to a debit for debit accounts and a credit for 
credit accounts.) To answer Geert's original question, to pay down a debt using an asset you 
would enter -100 in the asset account (credit the asset) and -100 in the liability account (debit 
the liability). That is how the budget module would represent that transaction, and how folks 
using the "reverse credit accounts" feature would understand it to be. For those who prefer 
setting "Reverse Balanced accounts" to "None", Geert's suggestion of representing the 
transaction by -100 to assets and +100 to liabilities would be correct. But those people would 
be in the minority I suppose. What is still wrong with the budget module: 1) The module should 
be sensitive to the setting of "Reverse balanced accounts". It currently does not seem to be, 
that I could tell. 2) The "Transfers" summary line shows the net effect of budgeting amounts to 
assets and liabilities. However, the transfers line is like a debit account, which causes the sign to 
switch in a disconcerting way when liabilities are budgeted. (See months 5 and 6, i.e., July and 
August, in the screenshot.) I suggest breaking the Transfers line apart into Assets and Liabilities, 
or, at least, showing the formula by which it is computed in the row title (i.e., "Transfers 
(Transfers to Assets - Transfers from Liabilities)" (that is, if "reverse credit accounts" is in 
effect)). However, there's no reason to assume that an entry of type "Transfers" would be like a 
debit account, so instead I suggest it would be better to get rid of the "Transfers" summary line 
altogether and instead include separate lines for "Transfers to Assets" and "Transfers from 
Liabilities". (To compound the issue, the Total line seems to be a credit account, of type Equity 
perhaps, which can cause a sign to bounce twice as we follow it through. +100 in Liabilities 
becomes -100 in the Transfers summary line which becomes +100 in the Total summary line.) 
3) The Total row title should include the formula by which it is calculated, i.e., (when "reverse 
credit accounts" is in effect) the row title should be "Total (Income - Expenses - Transfers to 
Assets + Transfers from Liabilities)". 4) Since the use of negative signs in Liabilities is confusing 
to many people, this all should be carefully documented somewhere. 5) Note there is something 
odd happening in the last four months of my artificial budget when I involve "Equity". I think this 
means that we should think about the Total row in the budget as a credit account of type Equity, 
so transfers to/from Equity have no effect on the Total. Still, it seems kind of odd. I would 
suggest including Equity in the summary rows at the bottom (Transfers from Equity) and in the 
Total, which would then be "Total (Income - Expenses - Transfers to Assets + Transfers from 
Liabilities + Transfers from Equity)". 6) There seem to be some other problems with the budget 
module that not everyone has. The budget module eats up a lot of compute cycles on my 
Windows machine, making it very slow to respond to typing, but not on my Mac. And I have 
trouble with one of my credit cards not being rolled up into the total Liabilities correctly. I'll have 
to spend some more time tracking those problems down. 7) I haven't begun to address the 
budget reports, but the budget balance sheet does seem to be wrong, as Larry and others have 
noted.