[GNC] Budget Questions and Observations

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Dec 12, 2019 w50d346, at 1:05 AM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Does anyone use the Budget features in GnuCash? I have been giving it a try
> and am finding some aspects quite puzzling. I have never been trained in
> budgets so maybe I need to read up on some particular methodology to make
> better sense of it. Maybe someone can weigh in with some background.
> 
> A few weeks ago I asked about the lack of account codes in budgets and
> budget reports and got no response. I wasn't surprised as I am sure very
> few folks use account codes in GnuCash. I did open bug #797489.
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797489

Sorry, I did see your post, but didn’t get time to test anything with codes as I don’t use them. So I couldn’t provide any feedback. Certainly, codes should be supported throughout the app.

> 
> My greatest astonishment with Budgets has been that all the INCOME numbers
> on the budget show as NEGATIVE. Is this by design? I have concluded this
> must be a bug, but maybe I'm doing something wrong, so I thought I would
> ask here before reporting it.
> 
> As a result of the negative income figures, to project budgeted income I
> have to enter income figures into the budget as negatives. Regardless the
> budgeted and actuals (by default) "normally" get displayed RED. (!) Then
> when I'm looking at the numbers, I have to tell myself that when looking at
> incomes, negative (red) incomes and differences are "good" and positive
> (black) income difference numbers are "bad." Is that right? I'm never
> certain. But I'm easily confused. Well, needless to say budgeted income
> numbers are darned hard to read.

There should be at least one bug on this already. (with respect to the budget module itself, possibly a separate one for the various reports as you noted below)

I think either the budget module preceded the reversed sign option, or else just didn’t implement it.

> 
> I keep wanting a way to pair up particular income and expense accounts in a
> budget so they offset each other. I realize this may be beyond the scope of
> the budget feature, but that one thing would it a lot easier to track
> encumbered or designated funds. (The budget I'm working with is for a
> church.) While I'm wishing, maybe budget and actual income and expense
> amounts could be grouped and added or subtracted usefully using some
> additional factor, such as account codes or search strings.

That might be a bit more difficult, certainly the way the present module and reports are designed. You might try creating separate budgets for each separate fund and match up expenses that way. (You can have as many budgets as you like, no need to have a single budget for the whole book for a whole year) If you really need something consolidated, then export the various related reports to a spreadsheet.

> 
> When entering budget amounts it would sometimes be useful to be able to
> enter one annual amount OR separate monthly budget amounts. But even with
> the existing design, when entering budget figures over multiple months it
> would be great if GnuCash could handle the math rather than having to
> divide by 12 on a calculator. At the very least it could parse math
> expressions like it does in the registers. I opened bug #727488 for this
> one.
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797488

That’s a good one. There is already the feature to estimate entries based on previous transactions, but making single entries that apply each month would make fresh entry a much faster process.

> 
> GnuCash contains several specialized Budget reports... but I suspect most
> haven't been fully implemented or tested. (I haven't opened any bugs for
> the following.)
> 
> The "Budget Report" works pretty well, but if you turn on all the columns
> and try to print it, you lose everything off the right side. (In other
> words, the report paginates properly vertically, but not horizontally.)

There *might* be a bug for that, but I don’t recall exactly. I might be thinking of the general bug about webkit pagination issues. (which I think is OS dependent due to different webkit versions being used)

> 
> Fortunately the Budget Report exports quite easily, so I can turn on as
> many columns I want and export the report and import it into a spreadsheet.
> With reformatting (like changing fonts and freezing column and row
> headings), a spreadsheet is a great way to view the budget numbers.
> Unfortunately copying and pasting into a spreadsheet from this report
> doesn't work reliably. You have to use the export feature.

That would be a separate bug, and would indicate to me the report is ‘malformed’ html. You should be able to copy/paste with the same result as export.

> 
> The Budget Chart report works, after a fashion. But its two chart options
> are limited and inflexible. I suspect exporting the Budget Report to a
> spreadsheet would be a better basis for generating charts.

I doubt these have received love in some years. Spreadsheets are likely the interim solution.

> 
> I am not certain I understand the purpose of the "Budget Income Statement"
> or "Budget Profit & Loss" They seem to show only budgeted amounts, not
> actuals. Are they intended to "test" a proposed budget for sanity? My
> negative budget amounts to workaround the negative income numbers (noted
> above) are not compatible with these reports because they work just the
> same as GnuCash's regular reports elsewhere.

I think there is a bug just for this (separate from the one for the module) and note that those two reports are really the same report with two names. (because people are used to one or the other, it was determined to duplicate it rather than make it less discoverable) And yes, the report exists so you can see if your P&L looks satisfactory should you hit all your budget targets.

> 
> The "Budget Balance Sheet" and "Budget Flow" reports ... I do not
> understand how these reports could ever be used. What is the effective date
> of the Balance Sheet? It's not labeled, nor is it adjustable (unless I
> missed something). The flow report has no label to show the selected budget
> period, and no labels over the columns, so even if it contains some useful
> data, it's inscrutable. Furthermore, the flow report provides only a very
> limited period display option -- just one period at a time, no multiple
> period options.

The Budget Balance Sheet *should* allow you to see how your positions will change as a result of your budget, but I don’t recall ever trying it out to see if it works. The Cash Flow report, even the non-budget version is not really a Cash Flow report as described in any accounting reference I can find. There is a bug on that, but I’m not sure the budget version is part of that discussion. The budget module summary itself does a better job of telling you if you run into a negative (or low) funds condition than that report.

Regards,
Adrien