Budgeting Reporting and Tagging

[Adrien Monteleone]

I’m not sure I’m understanding the question.

GC does not require you budget all of your income to particular expenses. Simply budget what you want and stop.

If you spend money you didn’t budget in any particular category, then you spent more than you budgeted. The fact that you had the spare cash because you didn’t ‘promise’ 100% of your earnings ahead of time doesn’t change that. Two dining transactions SHOULD show up in the same account, because they both are that expense. The fact that you planned to spend one and not the other shouldn’t mean they need to be separated.

I don’t see a purpose to ‘budgeted vs. unbudgeted’ expenses on a transaction level basis, but I suppose when you enter them, you could simply put ‘unbudgeted’ in the transaction notes and use the new transaction report to list them all should you find the need.

I might budget say $100 for dining out. If my budget report shows I spent more than that because I got an invite I didn’t plan on, I simply click the account name to open that expense register and I can see the transactions to make a decision as to where I went over and for what purpose.

I guess my question to you is, “What are you looking to find out and what kind of decision are you trying to make that having something tagged specifically as ‘unbudgeted’ would tell you that simply seeing you spent more than you budgeted would not?”

Regards,
Adrien


> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 15
> Date: Mon, 1 May 2017 20:49:08 -0700 (PDT)
> From: jwrauch <josephwrauch at gmail.com>
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Budgeting Reporting and Tagging
> Message-ID: <1493696948764-4691390.post at n4.nabble.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> I'm new to gnucash, but I've read through the documentation and I haven't
> seen a clean way of solving my issue.  When constructing my monthly budget I
> want to leave some funds as "unbudgeted", since they range from paying for
> an impromptu dinner with friends to paying for new socks.
> 
> Lets say I have an impromptu dinner with friends.  This transaction goes
> into an expenses:dining account.  Additionally, every Tuesday I go to bar
> trivia and get dinner.  This also goes into my expenses:dining account, but
> I'm expecting this transaction and can budget for it.   However, gnucash
> reports these transactions together as they are part of the same account. 
> Is there a way to tage transactions so that they are reported separately as
> "budgeted" and "unbudgeted".  In the app I can add notes, but I don't think
> they're maintained after a qif export as they don't show up in a
> transactions report or any of the register views.  
> 
> The closest solutions I've seen are to either create budgeted and unbudgeted
> subaccounts in all my expense accounts, or budgeted and unbudgeted
> superaccounts (expenses:budgeted:dining), or create a custom report.  I
> don't fancy changing up my account tree, but if that's the most recommended
> solution I'll try it.  Custom reports could also be the answer, I haven't
> looked into them as deeply because I wanted to check if there is an easier
> solution first.