I don't know anything at all about MS Money, but in general I would suggest it would be wise to abandon notions of how other software handles issues and instead try to do it in "the GnuCash way", or at least in "one of the GnuCash ways".
This is how I personally handle scheduled transactions: I set up GnuCash periodic scheduled transactions for all of my periodic transactions (utility bills, mortgage, and my regular pay, for example). I overestimate expenses and underestimate income. I do my best to estimate the dates of the transactions. In the description, I add "(EST)" or "(Estimate)". I set it up so that the transactions are automatically (not manually) posted to my accounts a certain period in advance. (I use 366 days, although that's extreme. Others on this list seem more likely to use 1 or 2 months.) When more information becomes available, for instance when I receive a utility bill or pay stub, I manually correct the posted transaction (date and all the amounts) and remove "(EST)" from the description. Sometimes I correct a whole year in advance, like when I get new insurance contracts, for example. Regularly I will search all accounts for transactions with descriptions containing "(EST)" which are dated on or before the current date. Those are transactions for which the necessary corrections are urgent. You can either do a global "Find" for such transactions or use Doug Doughty's new transaction report which hasn't yet made its way into a standard release (but I hope is on its way there). One advantage to Doug's report is that you can save it so you don't have to re-enter the search terms each time you want to run the search. Finally, I ensure that everything is correct by regularly reconciling all my accounts to the extent possible. (I reconcile almost everything except my income and expense accounts, and cash, the use of which I try to minimize.) Scheduled transactions are (for me at least) not a way to reduce workload. In fact, they probably increase my workload, because sometimes I have to make multiple different corrections to transactions. (My pay, especially, is like that. I occasionally receive pay raises which are hard to predict in advance. Recently, a regular deduction for university club dues was stopped when the club unexpectedly folded. So that's two corrections I (could have) made to a year's worth of pay transaction estimates. (Lazily, I didn't make the corrections because they're small and in the right direction, so I can reasonably leave the corrections until I receive the pay stubs. On the other hand, utility rate increases mean that I do have to make corrections to the scheduled transaction template and a year's worth of estimated scheduled transactions.) Scheduled transactions are (for me) a way to get good cash flow projections, and to provide a framework to allow me to plan better and to make small edits rather than wholesale changes to my financial records. Scheduled transactions are inevitably just estimates. So the question is when they will be corrected. Personally, I'm comfortable with leaving a year's worth of uncorrected future estimates in my accounts as long as they are marked as estimates and they are in the right direction (income low, expenses high). The difference with the MS Money approach seems to be that they are not comfortable posting any estimates at all. If that's the issue, my suggestion to you is to loosen that restriction, allow GnuCash to post estimates, and then correct them regularly. (The one issue I have with this whole process is in estimating discretionary credit card expenses which are not periodic. In that case I include estimated credit card payments which reflect my budget, and include a lump sum transfer from credit card to "miscellaneous expenses" which I later decrease as actual charges accrue, and then delete. It's a bit crude but seems to work well enough.) On 23 July 2017 at 11:54, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > I am struggling with Schedule in GC 2.6.16. I want to manually post > scheduled transactions and have the transactions show dates I select. > > I reviewed the Concepts Guide and the Help Manual, and searched the user > archives without success. I have bits and pieces, but still do not > understand how to manually post the transactions. > > My prior experience is with MS Money 3.0. MS Money shows a window with a > list of future transactions. To post a transaction in MS Money, I select > it and update fields such as date, amount, and memo. Then I enter the > transaction. The transaction is posted and a new, future transaction is > created in the list. > > I would like step-by-step instructions on how to manually post a scheduled > transaction starting with a transaction which is not set to be created by > GC. Is there a source for such instructions? > > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > [email protected] > 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. > -- Edward Doolittle Associate Professor of Mathematics First Nations University of Canada 1 First Nations Way, Regina SK S4S 7K2 « Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents et un ingrat. » -- Louis XIV, dans Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Chap. XXVI _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] 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.
