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.
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user@gnucash.org
To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
