Future allocated money vs Budgets

Edward Bridges ebridges at eqbridges.com
Sun Feb 4 06:45:20 EST 2018


I followed that discussion (somewhat, though was quite confused by a lot
of it), but I don't expect that to get implemented any time soon.
On Sat, Feb 3, 2018, at 11:08 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
> Welcome to the discussion!


>  


> So if I understand correctly, you have written scripts to automate the
> use of extra accounts to track allocated money? That was the line I
> was going down too (except building them into GNUCash), but Chris
> Lam’s discussion on “Budget transactions” is starting to look to me
> like a simpler and more elegant way to do what we want, whilst fitting
> in with other uses of budgets and automating what we want... Have a
> look on the Dev list for more details – can’t remember how much he
> posted on the user list about it.>  


> Thanks and regards,
> 
>  Matt

>  


> *From: *ebridges[1] *Sent: *Sunday, 4 February 2018 11:39 AM *To: *gnucash-
> user at gnucash.org *Subject: *Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets>  


> Sorry for the delayed response, just managing to catch up on
> this thread.
>
>  I've been looking at how to do envelope-style budgeting for my
>  personal finances using GnuCash for about 6-7 months.  Like you, this
>  began with this article from 2008 "[Better Budgeting with GnuCash"]
>  (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fallmybrain.com%2F2008%2F12%2F15%2Fbetter-budgeting-with-gnucash%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212&sdata=frZ3TUMhMzf%2FA2zBxsSTJZLW5UYLhrctdjhiXmgtvwE%3D&reserved=0)
>  .
>
>  After toying around with that approach, I decided there were two
>  drawbacks to it:
>
>  1. It was tedious.  Manually creating a split for every expense to
>     draw down budget accounts ("envelopes") that were allocated
>     previously, was super boring and error prone.  In addition,
>     because of the detailed nature of doing this work, one would be
>     discouraged from allocating all of your income to different
>     "envelopes".
>  2. It was fragile.  By treating "Budgeted Cash" as an asset made
>     allocated money difficult to reconcile to money that was drawn out
>     of your budget accounts.  A useful insight in that article is to
>     consider a budget account as a liability.  However, it categorizes
>     budgeted cash as an Asset, when it is more useful to consider it
>     also as a liability.  Doing so allows you to reconcile allocated
>     money to monies spent out of the "envelopes".
>
>  For the past month, I've been able to apply an approach to my
>  existing reconciliation process that I believe will prove to be a
>  very useful and easy to manage approach to envelope budgeting for
>  personal finance.
>
>  To simplify allocating income and expenses to envelopes I use
>  two tools:
>
>  * [QifQif]
>    (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FKraymer%2Fqifqif&data=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212&sdata=pGZVbq9N4uDjNAI2fJg0WroQ2t4MpcVUpqglYYVmmuw%3D&reserved=0)
>    which makes it easy to quickly insert categories into a QIF file;
>  * [qif-split]
>    (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Febridges%2Fqif-split&data=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212&sdata=eSOJkz3h29fzh4kHHVH5xf6sYk4Do7LBns%2B3jBCtfzA%3D&reserved=0)
>    , a tool that I wrote, which adds splits to QIF files according to
>    some rules defined in a file.
>
>  After downloading transactions for my credit card & bank accounts in
>  QIF format, I first process the file with QifQif to match up every
>  transaction to one of my accounts from GnuCash.  QifQif supports
>  using wild cards and regexes for matching payees to accounts, and
>  then adds the account as a  category to the QIF transaction.
>
>  After categorization of the transactions, the files can be processed
>  by  `qif-split`, and split according to predefined rules.
>
>  I have been using `QifQif` for about a year, and have found it to be
>  very reliable and easy to work with.  In the past month, I began
>  using `qif-split` to allocate income and expenses to budget accounts.
>
>  The `qif-split` configuration rules splitting the incoming
>  transactions are twofold
>
>  1. Allocating income as credits to various envelopes, or
>  2. Allocating expenses as debits to those same envelopes.
>
>  These allocations are balanced with corresponding debits or credits
>  to a "Budgeted Cash" account.  Because of these balanced entries, the
>  toplevel "Budgets" account will always self-reconcile (i.e. its
>  balance will always be 0).  When the balance of a given budget
>  subaccount ("envelopes") is negative, then you've overspent that
>  category.
>
>  By using `qif-split` to automatically generate split transactions,
>  and by altering my chart of accounts to roll up budgeted cash
>  alongside the budgeted expenses it makes envelope-style budgeting
>  very straightforward in GnuCash.
>
>
>
>
>  --
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