On 30 Sep, Josh Sled wrote: > On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 03:04:06PM -0500, Todd T. Fries wrote: <snip> > | it is possible to keep track of 'pools' of money independent of what > | account it is in? For example, we have 'educational savings' since > > Hmmm. It strikes me as both useful and not-useful... depending on the > situation. > > Example: We have two accounts A and B. We have two savings goals, X and Y. > Let's assume that they're both at their goals; X is $1000, and Y is $2000. > We have all $1000 of X in A, and $1000 of Y in A. The remaining $1000 > of Y is in B. Thus, A contains $2000, and B contains $1000. However, we > could equivalently say that A contains all of Y, and B contains all of X...
(Note: remember that when I say "bucket", I mean "logical budgeting unit/category") FWIW, I don't personally care to know *where* my budgeted money is - I have to manage my *physical* account balances separately from my *logical* bucket system anyway. Consider this: I have $500 allocated in a bucket for groceries. I spend $65 of that at the grocery store and charge it to my credit card. Now there's $435 left in my grocery bucket... ... but no physical transfer of funds has taken place, nor is one likely to take place for some time. If the $500 allocated in my grocery bucket was physically located in my savings account (likely), it's going to *stay* in my savings account until I have to pay my credit card bill, at which time I'll transfer it to my checking account, then pay my credit card. This will generate two *physical* transactions (Savings -> Checking, Checking -> Credit Card) which, in turn, won't affect the buckets at all. So there doesn't seem to me to be a natural mapping between budgets and physical accounts. > However, this assumes that the accounts are equivalent, whereas in > reality they are likely not. For instance, 'A' may be a less-liquid or > less-accessible account, in which it is not desireable to place allocations > toward short-term-needed savings goals. But this is really going to have to be managed by the user. Short of an expert system, I don't see a really good way of implementing this. However, if the budget subsystem is doing it's job, then I, as the user, should know *exactly* how much money is in my "Savings" budget, which will allow me to shift my physical monies between accounts as I see fit. > So, we have to have knowledge of the Savings Goal, and knowledge of the > accounts in which money may be stored. There's also some integration with > interest and the time-value of money... we shouldn't have to put $100/mo > towards A if interest is going to be made on the previous allocations... and > then, after the Savings Goal cap is reached, there is further income from > interest associated with that savings, which should be handled in some way. <snip> At this point I should probably note that for the purposes of the "bucket system" I consider interest to be income, but that income probably skips the normal bucket progression and lands directly in the bucket that makes most sense. So, I spend $500/month on groceries, but that $500 is actually sitting in my savings account until the bill is due, so my grocery bucket generates $0.x of interest, which I will probably apply to the "savings" bucket. I don't see a reason to re-assign that special income to the "grocery" bucket. Have a good one, Nato _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
