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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