[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: g> From: Ben Stanley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> g> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] g> Subject: A simple method of performing budgeting g> g> I have a book which claims to help people to budget and save money. They g> recommend that you open a bank account which will hold all your budgeted g> funds. You create a set of accounts for your budget: g> I think this method is a good way to start the discussion of budgeting, but it may be too simplistic for real life. The budgeting system should not force me to transfer money from one physical account to another to pay my bills, when I should just be able to write a check from the account that has the money this week. As I see it, the point of managing my finances via software should be to reduce the amount of shuffling I have to do in the "real world." Quicken has something called "savings goals" which are kind of like virtual accounts. Savings goals are not used for Quicken's budgeting feature, but they do allow something similar to what you describe. Basically you set up transfers from "real" accounts to savings goals. These transfers never get reconciled because they didn't happen in real life. However, the money transferred to savings goals does *not* show in the account it's really in, so you won't spend it on other things. When it's time to spend the money from a savings goal, you transfer the money back to the account it's really in, and spend it. This interface is a little klunky for everyday budgeting; in Quicken it's mainly used to save for large purchases. However, I think a GUI could be concocted which works this way internally, which could take care of swapping out which accounts donated to the budget items if the user wanted to pay some bills from a different account this month. -- Aaron _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
