[GNC] Top-Level Account:Expenses not totaling in Budget

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Jul 6, 2020 w28d188, at 8:36 AM, Lorrie Laskey <lrlaskey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>   1. How do I get a total monthly expense value for all expenses?

That should be in the summary at the bottom as well as in the parent account ‘Expenses’ line in the budget itself.

*note — do not enter a value into a parent account cell that you want to be a ‘roll-up’ sum of its children. Leave it blank and the budget sheet will auto-tally the children and display that as the amount of the parent budget. Otherwise, you get a fixed amount for the parent that you entered. You can’t even have a ‘zero’ there. It must be empty of your own entry. (it may show a gray ‘0.00’ in that case)

>   2. Is there not a feature to autofill or drag the monthly values, say
>   $60 for phone, into all months? Otherwise copy and paste are so error-prone
>   and time-consuming.

Yes, use the ‘All Periods’ button on the toolbar. You can replace an amount, add to an existing figure, or multiply an existing figure by your entry and even choose to round to a significant figure.

>   3. How are 1-time payments for a time period handled? Examples are
>   insurance paid once per six months.

That is up to you. Some people budget the one time payment. Some spread it out evenly. For example, I budget the payment of insurance to a pre-paid asset account, then expense it over time.

>   4. Can the Column of the budget not be adjusted by inputting a width
>   value like a column in a spreadsheet? Grabbing and pulling the column is
>   not exact and the width changes with the browser window width requiring
>   constant fiddling.

Sadly, no. I don’t think any part of GnuCash works that way at this time. The only column I can adjust at all in the Budget is the Account Name. Not sure how you are managing to adjust the others. I thought they would auto-fit the number of digits.


>   5. How do I remove specific expenses from the list of expenses under the
>   Expenses top-level account? I don't want to see expenses listed where I
>   will have a zero value.

View > Filter By... > Other > uncheck `Show zero total accounts`

Note, the option to not show ‘unused accounts’ will hide any accounts for which you do not have transactions.

There is no way to toggle individual accounts otherwise, but when running the Budget Report, you get another opportunity to exclude them in Options > Accounts as a per-account setting.

----


Finally, be sure to use the latest GnuCash (4.0), the budget module has received several updates over the last year and older versions might not work the same or even have some features missing. (like the 'All Periods’ button, not sure when that was implemented)


Regards,
Adrien