[GNC] Budgeting

[Adrien Monteleone]

The budget estimate function is designed to estimate how much to budget based on historical transactions. You have the option to use an average or not. If you do not, then each period will be filled in based on the history as-is. If you choose the ‘average’ option, *all* periods will have budget values pre-entered based on the average over the total accounting period.

For example, if your Auto Expenses were:

Jan	Feb	Mar
100	125	75

Then those would be your estimated budget amounts for the same periods in the new budget.

But if you chose the ‘average’ option you’d get:

Jan	Feb	Mar
100	100	100

Because the ‘average’ for each period would be the sum of the historical periods (300) divided by the periods (3), or 100 each period.

If you have no historical data, you get zero as an estimate. (or if you chose a non-historical period to create the estimate from) Sadly, the dialog is not crystal clear you need to enter the date range for where to draw the historical data from. (it appears you want to enter the dates you want to estimate, not the date range for the source data)

I consider this a bug, and if it isn’t already filed, or you don’t beat me to it, I’ll get it filed. It stood out for me the other day during testing.

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Concerning ‘cash flow’, that is a specifically named report, both in accounting texts, and in GnuCash. Unfortunately, the same named GnuCash version is nothing like the text book version. Honestly, I find very little use for the GC version though I’m sure some might.

The purpose of the text book version is to show a cash-basis accounting for entities that use accrual accounting. If you are on a cash-basis already, then you don’t need a ‘cash flow’ report. Your P&L (Income Statement) is already ‘cash flow’.

If you want to see how much you’ve spent in each expense account for a specific period, either run a P&L/Income Statement report, or a Transaction Report. The Transaction report is *way* more versatile, though the P&L now has a multi-period option that might be more illustrative and you can have a column for each month side-by-side. (I still wish it had a comparative or variance column, as I still have to export to spreadsheet) The Transaction report version of the same thing is linear rather than columnar. But it does give you the info.

There is also user designed Comparative Transaction report floating here on the list from last year or so that I found really useful. (and is columnar) Unfortunately, I don’t think it still works with the 3.x series, and I haven’t had time to figure out why exactly. (something to do with time stamps, I suspect a change in how they are stored in GC)

Regards,
Adrien

> On May 6, 2020 w19d127, at 12:25 AM, flywire <flywire0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The budget estimate didn't give me an average monthly expense as I
> expected, everything was zero. It would really benefit from a tutorial.
> 
> Can I get a cash flow report with the monthly expenditure in columns for
> all of the income and expense accounts?