[GNC] A Couple of Budgeting Notes

[David T.]

Hello,

In recent days, I've been tinkering around (again) with GnuCash's budget 
features, and I thought I'd share a couple of things that were not 
obvious to me from the interface or the documentation with regards to 
setting budget values.

First, it was not clear to me how the Estimate function operated. 
Specifically, if I use this function and leave the "Use Average" box 
unchecked, I didn't understand that each value in the result was derived 
from the corresponding period in sequence in the sample. In other words, 
the first budget amount was set to the first period transactions, the 
second budget amount to the second period of transactions, and so on. As 
an example, imagine I have a 12-month budget from 3/1/2020 to 2/28/2021, 
and I set the Estimator to use transactions from 10/1/2010. The amount 
budgeted for 3/1/2020 will be equal to the transactions in 10/2010, 
4/1/2020 will be equal to the transactions in 11/2010, etc. On this 
subject, the Guide simply says that the estimator will look at all 
transactions in the selected period but doesn't explain how the numbers 
are derived or allocated.

Second, it may be of use to others to know that it is easy to set some 
accounts to use an equal budgeted amount, while setting others to vary 
over time to reflect seasonal changes in amounts. The way to accomplish 
this is to use the Estimate function separately for each type of budget 
account. Open the Estimate option, select the accounts for which you 
want varying amounts and uncheck the Use Average button. Now, repeat the 
process for the fixed value accounts, and check the Use Average box. 
Your budget will now have both fixed and varying amounts in the 
different accounts. As I said, this may be obvious to some, but it 
wasn't something that I realized for some time.

I hope that sharing these points with the list will help others make 
more productive use of the budget features.

Cheers,

David T.