[GNC] Budgets & Account Codes

Tommy Trussell tommy.trussell at gmail.com
Thu Nov 7 01:50:58 EST 2019


Summary:
Is there any way to display and sort by Account Codes when working with
GnuCash Budgets?

Background:
I recently volunteered to help a treasurer for a religious organization.
I've used GnuCash for personal and small business books for 10 or 15 years.
SO I thought GnuCash might help make the treasurer's books easier to
maintain.

It's a very tiny organization. The primary existing bookkeeping is on a
paper ledger. They use single entry accounting, income items on the left
page, payments on the right. They have one checking account, three
investment accounts. They supplant their paper ledger with some very simple
spreadsheets for keeping up with donations and a few budget items.
Everything else is done with pen and paper (plus cryptic pencil marks in
the margins). :-)

Unfortunately, converting things to GnuCash is taking a bit more fumbling
than I expected.

The challenge for today: I thought one time-saving innovation would be to
use Account Codes to match the numbered lines in the organizations's annual
budget. I have never used budgets in GnuCash before, but this looks like an
ideal use for them. The codes work great in the Accounts window, and it's
easy to quickly see the accumulated totals, etc.

HOWEVER I created a new budget in GnuCash, and the Account Codes are
nowhere to be seen. Am I missing an option to respect account codes in the
budget accounts listings, or was this an oversight? I realize I could go
through and rename the accounts to start with the code numbers... but I'm
hoping I'm just missing an option somewhere.

I also don't see any way to display Account Codes on any of the budget
reports.

P.S.: I dug around and I believe the only reports in GnuCash that have an
option to show Account Codes are:
  General Ledger,
  Account Summary,
  Transaction Report,
  Future Scheduled Transactions Summary, and
  Reconciliation Report.
(Though I may have missed some.)

I'm running GnuCash 3.7 on Ubuntu 19.10.


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