How should I enter values on a budget in gnucash ?

[Phil Longstaff]

I am aware of how slow budget entry is and am hoping to do something about
this soon.

Phil

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 5:40 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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