Hmm... that's funny. What you call an "expense" budget is *exactly* how I budget, too, but I've been calling it a "cash budget". My source for that usage is an accounting textbook that has a whole chapter for cash budgeting another for capital budgeting. I think its definitions were chosen to contrast those two. But, some googling shows your use of "expense budget" and "cash budget" are commonplace. I think I'll start calling it "expense budgeting", because, I must say, that term does make more sense to me.
Anyway, these two are much more similar than either is to capital budgeting. On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 02:37:46PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > My expense budget simply counts all the expense accounts in my > bookkeeping; it is convenient to use exactly the same budgeting > categories as I have expense accounts. More complicated organizations > do not normally treat budgeting categories and accounts so closely. I informally polled a few professional accountants on this question, and the consensus was that they generally *do* try to keep budgeting categories as close as possible to expense accounts, down to a certain level of detail. When there's a difference it's usually just that the expense accounts are more specific than the budget categories. > The cash budget is then a different beast. I could do it ground up, > but instead it cribs figures from the expense budget. This works well > because I am a simple case. So I consider annual cash credits and > debits. My cash debits are my total income plus any loans I plan to > take out. (Strictly speaking, if I receive income which is > noncashable, and I don't expend it that year [a starbucks card, which > I receive as a gift on Dec. 25, for example], I should also subtract > from cash debits, but the amount of these are negligible in my case.) > My cash credits are my expenses, minus those expenses which are not > paid from cash assets (for example, depreciation on the car, > capitalized student load interest, and so forth), plus additional cash > payments (debt retirement, asset transfers). Your description of "cash budgeting" sounds like you're summing all cash debits and credits into one number for each period. That seems like generating a periodic projected cash-flow report, yes? If you make budget entries for all your income, expense, liability and cash assets, wouldn't you get this number by summing the column for each period? A "total" row and column are something that I want to eventually add to the budget report. As it is, I still end up exporting the budget report to html and beautifying it and adding summations, but it'd be nice to see the summations before exporting. -chris _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
