[GNC] GnuCash budget feature

[nick corbin]

Hi

This email is just to let you know that I have 'discovered' a use for this
feature that is implied but not explicitly highlighted in the
documentation. The related documentation (section 14.2.4 Entering Budget
values) reads as follows:
If you have past transactions recorded in *GnuCash*, the second way is to
let *GnuCash* estimate the budget values by looking at those transactions.
First, select the accounts you want *GnuCash* to estimate. Then click on
the Estimate *Toolbar* button. In the *Estimate Budget Values* dialog,
select the date past which *GnuCash* should look for past transactions.
*GnuCash* will start at that date and look forward for the duration of your
budget. For example, if you are making an annual budget, and you select
Jan. 1, 2005, *GnuCash* will look at all the transactions in that account
from Jan. 1, 2005 through Dec. 31, 2005.
Rather than having GnuCash "estimate the budget values", as described
above, this approach in fact populates the months in the forecast period
with actual values recorded for the same months in the previous period,
provided that the month name specified for the historical data is the same
as that used as the starting month for the budget. This avoids the user
having to generate a custom report to extract these amounts by month and to
then reformat the results as a set of columns; I think I am correct in
saying that there is currently no other GnuCash report that does this. I
simply create a budget for the coming 12 months, starting 1 August 2025. I
then tell GnuCash to populate it with amounts based on the previous 12
months starting 1 August 2024.

This was probably glaringly obvious to the developers of this feature, and
to those who wrote the documentation, but I only appreciated it once I
played with it and realised how useful it is. To me, busy migrating my
personal finances from Excel to GnuCash (and coming to appreciate the power
of double-entry bookkeeping), this saves an enormous amount of time.

Thanks for creating GnuCash - it's a great program

Regards
Nick Corbin
+27828546533