Budgeting Reporting and Tagging

Mon May 8 12:27:40 EDT 2017

Joseph,

Thanks I understand more clearly now what you are after.

Making a separate un-budgeted asset account is likely the easiest approach for handling these funds. You could make this a child of Cash or Checking or one for each. The reason for a child account is that technically that money is still part of that parent account and this way GC will give you a rolled up total at all times. I tried something similar to this as a full budgeting mechanism. I created child cash accounts for each of about a dozen parent expense categories and spent from those accounts. Things got messy when I needed to shift funds however so I abandoned the idea. Your approach of having a single unbudgeted funds account might be much simpler.

As for reporting, the Budget Report should show you the budgeted vs. actual and a variance. Unfortunately, it is limited at this time to the period you budgeted for and by each month if there is more than one in that budget period. (Quarterly is not possible as a sub-report, you have to make a budget for that particular quarter separately and run a report for that budget) There is also the limitation that it does not tell you how much you have left to spend, YTD. So if you were over spending for several months on an expense, as of say now (May) you’ll still show that over the entire year have money left to spend because the rest of the year hasn’t happened yet and you’ve budgeted for it. You can’t see performance vs. the budget ‘as of today.'

There have been many discussions about this here and I’m not sure but someone may be working on a better report.

There is a Budget Flow report which one would think could show what you want with respect to money coming from specific asset accounts, but alas, it does not. You can restrict which asset accounts show on the report, but it still gives you all expense transactions, not just those linked to that asset. Interestingly, it does allow you to select periods (months) for the report rather than the entire budget range, but for this report only.

I did find that you can run a Find from the Chart of Accounts tab and use the “Account” criteria, selecting the asset account you want and the specific expense accounts you want and you’ll get a register list of transactions that match. (be sure to set the ‘match all criteria’ option and not ‘any criteria’) Unfortunately, this is not a report. You could also try out the new Transaction Report found here in the mailing list which might be what you are looking for.

I don’t use the mobile app but I have heard of some issues getting some data from it to the desktop. It could be descriptions are one of those things. Start a separate question on it and see what response you get.

Regards,

Adrien

> On May 8, 2017, at 10:39 AM, Joseph Rauch <josephwrauch at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I understand what you're saying, which is why I didn't like the solution of splitting my expense accounts.  What I want is an easy way to see how much of my unbudgeted funds I've spent before making an unbudgeted puchase.  I also want a report at the end of the month looking at my budgeted transactions and how they compare to the budget I laid out.  As well as a report looking at all my unbudgeted transactions and what proportion each expense account took of those.  Thinking on it now, perhaps I just need to split my assets:bank account into an unbudgeted and budgeted account.  Then draw funds for each transaction from the appropriate account.  Then I can quickly check the funds in the unbudgeted account before making an unbudgeted purchase. When reporting, can I specify to see all transactions in my expense accounts which come from a specific asset account?   
> 
> I think adding notes can give me the information I want too, but the notes I made on the app weren't appearing in my transaction report on the computer after exporting and importing a qif.  
> 
> On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com <mailto:adrien.monteleone at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 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 <mailto:josephwrauch at gmail.com>>
> > To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> > Subject: Budgeting Reporting and Tagging
> > Message-ID: <1493696948764-4691390.post at n4.nabble.com <mailto: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.
> 
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