envelope budgeting (was Re: New report - Compare current spending versus historic average)

[Gour]

On Fri, 5 May 2017 11:04:41 -0400
Cindy Doughty <dbdoughty at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Doug,

Thank you very much for sharing your reports!

> This report allows you to pick a time period and then compare it with
> the average
> This report has all of the functionality of  the multiple periods
> side by side report, it just adds some additional options.

Let me admit that few times I tried to migrate from Gnucash to some of the
#plaintextaccounting packages - {beancount,(h)ledger}, but after some time
returned back to GC. :-)

Data entry, reconcilation, general UI are great in GC as well as available
reports. The only practical thing which bugs me is to make better use of budget
feature - unfortunately, not used, afaik, by any core GC dev. 

However, your work (aka reports) make me hopefuly that it would be possible to
do everything here and stay with Gnucash.

I read some past articles about doing 'envelope budgeting' with GC by creating
parallel 'budget' accounts and include them in every transaction, but it all
looks a bit complicated when my needs are probably not so extensive.

Your report can help to arrive at e.g. average amount for each Expense account
I'm interested in and it would be great if one could use those to, somehow,
automagically enter those amounts in the estimated entry fields for each month
within budget's period since Estimate function in Budget feature does calculate
values based on the past amounts for *each* month separately, which makes
amount skewed - e.g. I pay car insurance and associated costs once per weak and
would like that the cost is distibuted evenly throughout the year. Same with
the cost for heating (gas) which greatly differs between summer/winter season?


Do you believe it's possible without going too deep in the GC's core?

I'd like to be able to (easily) create yearly budget based on my previous
expenses and to always have insight how I'm doing, iow. how are actual expenses
are in comparison with the yearly budget's plan so we can plan further expenses
accordingly depending if we are spending over/under the budget.

Do you have any suggestion how to take advantage of current Gnucash's
technology to achieve that and what parts/reports do you see missing which
could be done by the end-user's report(s)?

I'm also interested if you can throw some advice in regard to learning
Guile/Scheme for the purpose of GC reporting although I'm afraid that at the
time when I learn enough of it, Gnucash will abandon it. :-)

In the past I wanted to learn/use Racket, but never had enough time and/or
purpose to really do it.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Many, many births both you and I have passed. I can remember
all of them, but you cannot, O subduer of the enemy!