How do people do their budgeting? Budgets need planning, reporting, and revising based on actual transactions. GnuCash reports of past transactions can help budget and a cashbook is best positioned for reporting budget compared to year-to-date amounts.
A monthly budget simply dividing annual income and expenses by 12 is normally convenient for a quick look but if cash flow is really tight you might want next-level budgeting. You can align budget periods with regular income periods, maybe fortnightly. If you plan to use a tax refund to pay for a holiday it is no good if the expense occurs at the start of the month and the income is received at the end. demo-budget.csv Account,Bgt,Frequency,Periods,Annual Asset,.,,, Income,,,, Salary,-$670.00,f,26,-17420 Expense,,,, Electricity,$78.00,q,4,312 Groceries,$120.00,w,52,6240 Miscellaneous,$100.00,m,12,1200 Internet,$20.00,m,12,240 Phone,$45.00,m,12,540 Rent,$700.00,m,12,8400 Based on the Concepts Guide Ideally, amounts can be budgeted for when they occur. You know exactly when salary and rent are due and probably have a regular groceries budget. Other things like say insurance are annual amounts. You should be able to enter the planned date for these amounts. Provisional amounts like miscellaneous costs or new projects can be entered for the budget periods. A spreadsheet is really handy for this interactive process. Past transactions can be factored up for inflation, and new transactions added. Annual amounts can spread though the year by entering a couple of dates for the period and dragging the amounts down, then adjusting say winter electricity to be higher than summer. A good budgeting program should allow the spreadsheet to be uploaded and allocate each transaction to the budget periods. You need the ability to zoom in on the transactions for a given period, change date and amount details possibly in a spreadsheet, and run the budget report again using actual year-to-date amounts or different budget periods for what has happened and is still planned. Maybe notional transaction dates and amounts can be adjusted to better reflect the expected amount, some of the grocery costs held over to the next period, insurance paid monthly so the annual premium falls due at a different time of year, or sell the firstborn. That's the power of a cash flow budget. It's been a while since I tried out GnuCash budgeting but it fell short of next-level budgeting. That's when it makes a difference. What do you think? Regards _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
