Re: How to assign transaction to accounts automatically.

[Edward Bridges]

If you downloaded the transactions in QIF format, you may find this tool 
interesting:

https://github.com/Kraymer/qifqif

I have used for about a year now and it's really effective at categorizing 
transactions to the correct account before importing.


On Tue, Feb 20, 2018, at 10:09 AM, John Ralls wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Feb 20, 2018, at 4:39 AM, Hans Deragon  wrote:
> > 
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > New user here.  I downloaded 500 transactions from my credit card bank
> > site, all assigned to 'Imbalanced-CAD'.  Now, how can I set rules to
> > automatically assign transactions to a specific account?  For instance,
> > any transaction with "^ESSO.*" or "^SHELL.*" must be reassigned to
> > Car:Gasoline.  I fail to find that information on the web, except that
> > when importing, GnuCash trains itself and does that automatically at the
> > next import.
> > 
> > But what about my 500 transactions that are already imported?  What
> > about if one wants to reassign transactions to another account, after a
> > month of careful thinking?  Does a user have to go through all
> > transactions manually?
> > 
> > As a workaround, is it possible to convert the GnuCash file into Unicode
> > and use scripting languages to manipulate the transactions, then convert
> > it back to its binary format?
> > 
> > Using GnuCash 2.6.12 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
> 
> No, GnuCash does not train itself: You have to train it. You do that by 
> assigning the transactions to accounts during import. That’s what that 
> dialog with all of the yellow was about. Your best course of action is 
> to go to the backup from before the import and start over.
> 
> Otherwise, yes, the only way to change transactions is one-at-a-time. 
> You can speed it up a bit using the Edit>Find to select a group of 
> transactions that you want to change to a particular. You’ll get a 
> editable register and you can just go down the list changing each 
> transfer account.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
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Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets

[Edward Bridges]

We're getting into nebulous, philosophical territory, but I'll take you up on 
your position.

By putting cash into an envelope, it's allocated and is now an obligation.  If 
you have made the decision to abide by the purpose of allocating monies to 
envelopes, then you understand that the cash you've put in the envelope is 
committed.   You're now obligated to use it for that purpose.

In my CofA, "Budgets" is a top-level account and all budget accounts are 
sub-accounts of that -- including budgeted cash.  As such, it's balance should 
always be "0".

It actually works quite nicely!


On Sun, Feb 4, 2018, at 8:34 AM, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> If the money is physically divided into envelopes, or left in some bank 
> account and ‘segregated in place’ then it IS an asset.
> 
> If this allocation is merely virtual and has no relationship to where it 
> actually exists, then it isn’t ANY of the top level accounts, certainly 
> NOT a liability. You don’t owe that money to anyone. A liability is an 
> accrued expense, that is, an expense you owe but haven’t paid yet.
> 
> Sure, you haven’t paid budgeted expenses yet, but you don’t owe money 
> you’ve budgeted. No one has any claim on your assets for that amount.
> 
> At best, it is your own claim against your own assets, which would make 
> it an element of Equity. But even that is problematic as tracking it 
> appropriately results in the temporary inflation of both assets and 
> equity until the money is actually spent on expenses.
> 
> This is why I stopped using GnuCash for the purpose, and why, although 
> I’d like this functionality to be in the same place, I think I’m more of 
> the opinion as expressed on gnucash-devel that the proper way to handle 
> this is export my revenue and expense transactions into some other app 
> that handles the budgeting according to the method I desire to use.
> 
> It just can’t be shoehorned properly into the standard top level account 
> structure.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> > On Feb 4, 2018, at 5:44 AM, Edward Bridges <ebrid...@eqbridges.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I understand your concern, but I don't think that would be the
> > case here.
> > They may be included in the net worth but because all entries net to
> > zero they are balanced and they have no net effect on net worth.
> > The issue I've seen with previous proposals both here and in the
> > mentioned blog post is that income allocated to envelopes is treated as
> > an asset -- which it really shouldn't be.  By treating it as a liability
> > you can balance that allocated income to expenses as they get allocated.
> > 
> > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Christopher Lam wrote:
> >> Looks nice. My main concern with these "shadow accounts" is that they
> >> will, by default, be counted in the Net worth reports, income reports,
> >> etc, and must be manually deselected every time.> 
> >> In my view budget allocations are technically "outside the books" and
> >> must therefore ideally be recorded in ways that don't affect the
> >> everyday data and reports.> 
> >> On 4 Feb 2018 8:43 AM, "ebridges" <ebrid...@eqbridges.com> wrote:
> >>> Sorry for the delayed response, just managing to catch up on this
> >>> thread.>> 
> >>> I've been looking at how to do envelope-style budgeting for my
> >>> personal>>  finances using GnuCash for about 6-7 months.  Like you, this 
> >>> began
> >>> with this>>  article from 2008 "[Better Budgeting with
> >>> GnuCash"]
> >>> (http://allmybrain.com/2008/12/15/better-budgeting-with-gnucash/).>> 
> >>> After toying around with that approach, I decided there were two
> >>> drawbacks>>  to it:
> >>> 
> >>> 1. It was tedious.  Manually creating a split for every expense to
> >>>draw down>>  budget accounts ("envelopes") that were allocated 
> >>> previously,
> >>> was super>>  boring and error prone.  In addition, because of the detailed
> >>> nature of>>  doing this work, one would be discouraged from allocating 
> >>> all of
> >>> your income>>  to different "envelopes".
> >>> 2. It was fragile.  By treating "Budgeted Cash" as an asset made
> >>>allocated>>  money difficult to reconcile to money that was drawn out 
> >>> of your
> >>> budget>>  accounts.  A useful insight in that article is to consider a 
> >>> budget
> >>> account>>  as a liability.  Howe

Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets

[Edward Bridges]

I followed that discussion (somewhat, though was quite confused by a lot
of it), but I don't expect that to get implemented any time soon.
On Sat, Feb 3, 2018, at 11:08 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
> Welcome to the discussion!


>  


> So if I understand correctly, you have written scripts to automate the
> use of extra accounts to track allocated money? That was the line I
> was going down too (except building them into GNUCash), but Chris
> Lam’s discussion on “Budget transactions” is starting to look to me
> like a simpler and more elegant way to do what we want, whilst fitting
> in with other uses of budgets and automating what we want... Have a
> look on the Dev list for more details – can’t remember how much he
> posted on the user list about it.>  


> Thanks and regards,
> 
>  Matt

>  


> *From: *ebridges[1] *Sent: *Sunday, 4 February 2018 11:39 AM *To: *gnucash-
> u...@gnucash.org *Subject: *Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets>  


> Sorry for the delayed response, just managing to catch up on
> this thread.
>
>  I've been looking at how to do envelope-style budgeting for my
>  personal finances using GnuCash for about 6-7 months.  Like you, this
>  began with this article from 2008 "[Better Budgeting with GnuCash"]
>  
> (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fallmybrain.com%2F2008%2F12%2F15%2Fbetter-budgeting-with-gnucash%2F=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212=frZ3TUMhMzf%2FA2zBxsSTJZLW5UYLhrctdjhiXmgtvwE%3D=0)
>  .
>
>  After toying around with that approach, I decided there were two
>  drawbacks to it:
>
>  1. It was tedious.  Manually creating a split for every expense to
> draw down budget accounts ("envelopes") that were allocated
> previously, was super boring and error prone.  In addition,
> because of the detailed nature of doing this work, one would be
> discouraged from allocating all of your income to different
> "envelopes".
>  2. It was fragile.  By treating "Budgeted Cash" as an asset made
> allocated money difficult to reconcile to money that was drawn out
> of your budget accounts.  A useful insight in that article is to
> consider a budget account as a liability.  However, it categorizes
> budgeted cash as an Asset, when it is more useful to consider it
> also as a liability.  Doing so allows you to reconcile allocated
> money to monies spent out of the "envelopes".
>
>  For the past month, I've been able to apply an approach to my
>  existing reconciliation process that I believe will prove to be a
>  very useful and easy to manage approach to envelope budgeting for
>  personal finance.
>
>  To simplify allocating income and expenses to envelopes I use
>  two tools:
>
>  * [QifQif]
>
> (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FKraymer%2Fqifqif=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212=pGZVbq9N4uDjNAI2fJg0WroQ2t4MpcVUpqglYYVmmuw%3D=0)
>which makes it easy to quickly insert categories into a QIF file;
>  * [qif-split]
>
> (https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Febridges%2Fqif-split=02%7C01%7C%7C9b6d2224a4b3476a8f9b08d56b67cddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435%7C1%7C0%7C636533015939354212=eSOJkz3h29fzh4kHHVH5xf6sYk4Do7LBns%2B3jBCtfzA%3D=0)
>, a tool that I wrote, which adds splits to QIF files according to
>some rules defined in a file.
>
>  After downloading transactions for my credit card & bank accounts in
>  QIF format, I first process the file with QifQif to match up every
>  transaction to one of my accounts from GnuCash.  QifQif supports
>  using wild cards and regexes for matching payees to accounts, and
>  then adds the account as a  category to the QIF transaction.
>
>  After categorization of the transactions, the files can be processed
>  by  `qif-split`, and split according to predefined rules.
>
>  I have been using `QifQif` for about a year, and have found it to be
>  very reliable and easy to work with.  In the past month, I began
>  using `qif-split` to allocate income and expenses to budget accounts.
>
>  The `qif-split` configuration rules splitting the incoming
>  transactions are twofold
>
>  1. Allocating income as credits to various envelopes, or
>  2. Allocating expenses as debits to those same envelopes.
>
>  These allocations are balanced with corresponding debits or credits
>  to a "Budgeted Cash" account.  Because of these balanced entries, the
>  toplevel "Budgets" account will always self-reconcile (i.e. its
>  balance will always be 0).  When the balance of a given budget
>  subaccount ("envelopes") is negative, then you've overspent that
>  category.
>
>  By using `qif-split` to automatically generate split transactions,
>  and by altering my chart of accounts to roll up budgeted cash
>  alongside the budgeted expenses it makes envelope-style 

Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets

[Edward Bridges]

I understand your concern, but I don't think that would be the
case here.
They may be included in the net worth but because all entries net to
zero they are balanced and they have no net effect on net worth.
The issue I've seen with previous proposals both here and in the
mentioned blog post is that income allocated to envelopes is treated as
an asset -- which it really shouldn't be.  By treating it as a liability
you can balance that allocated income to expenses as they get allocated.

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Christopher Lam wrote:
> Looks nice. My main concern with these "shadow accounts" is that they
> will, by default, be counted in the Net worth reports, income reports,
> etc, and must be manually deselected every time.> 
> In my view budget allocations are technically "outside the books" and
> must therefore ideally be recorded in ways that don't affect the
> everyday data and reports.> 
> On 4 Feb 2018 8:43 AM, "ebridges"  wrote:
>> Sorry for the delayed response, just managing to catch up on this
>> thread.>> 
>>  I've been looking at how to do envelope-style budgeting for my
>>  personal>>  finances using GnuCash for about 6-7 months.  Like you, this 
>> began
>>  with this>>  article from 2008 "[Better Budgeting with
>>  GnuCash"]
>>  (http://allmybrain.com/2008/12/15/better-budgeting-with-gnucash/).>> 
>>  After toying around with that approach, I decided there were two
>>  drawbacks>>  to it:
>> 
>>  1. It was tedious.  Manually creating a split for every expense to
>> draw down>>  budget accounts ("envelopes") that were allocated 
>> previously,
>>  was super>>  boring and error prone.  In addition, because of the detailed
>>  nature of>>  doing this work, one would be discouraged from allocating all 
>> of
>>  your income>>  to different "envelopes".
>>  2. It was fragile.  By treating "Budgeted Cash" as an asset made
>> allocated>>  money difficult to reconcile to money that was drawn out of 
>> your
>>  budget>>  accounts.  A useful insight in that article is to consider a 
>> budget
>>  account>>  as a liability.  However, it categorizes budgeted cash as an 
>> Asset,
>>  when it>>  is more useful to consider it also as a liability.  Doing so 
>> allows
>>  you to>>  reconcile allocated money to monies spent out of the "envelopes".
>> 
>>  For the past month, I've been able to apply an approach to my
>>  existing>>  reconciliation process that I believe will prove to be a very
>>  useful and>>  easy to manage approach to envelope budgeting for personal 
>> finance.>> 
>>  To simplify allocating income and expenses to envelopes I use two
>>  tools:>> 
>>  * [QifQif](https://github.com/Kraymer/qifqif) which makes it easy to
>>quickly>>  insert categories into a QIF file;
>>  * [qif-split](https://github.com/ebridges/qif-split), a tool that I
>>wrote,>>  which adds splits to QIF files according to some rules defined 
>> in
>>  a file.>> 
>>  After downloading transactions for my credit card & bank accounts
>>  in QIF>>  format, I first process the file with QifQif to match up every
>>  transaction>>  to one of my accounts from GnuCash.  QifQif supports using 
>> wild
>>  cards and>>  regexes for matching payees to accounts, and then adds the
>>  account as a>>  category to the QIF transaction.
>> 
>>  After categorization of the transactions, the files can be
>>  processed by>>  `qif-split`, and split according to predefined rules.
>> 
>>  I have been using `QifQif` for about a year, and have found it to
>>  be very>>  reliable and easy to work with.  In the past month, I began using
>>  `qif-split` to allocate income and expenses to budget accounts.
>> 
>>  The `qif-split` configuration rules splitting the incoming
>>  transactions are>>  twofold
>> 
>>  1. Allocating income as credits to various envelopes, or
>>  2. Allocating expenses as debits to those same envelopes.
>> 
>>  These allocations are balanced with corresponding debits or
>>  credits to a>>  "Budgeted Cash" account.  Because of these balanced 
>> entries, the
>>  toplevel>>  "Budgets" account will always self-reconcile (i.e. its balance 
>> will
>>  always>>  be 0).  When the balance of a given budget subaccount
>>  ("envelopes") is>>  negative, then you've overspent that category.
>> 
>>  By using `qif-split` to automatically generate split transactions,
>>  and by>>  altering my chart of accounts to roll up budgeted cash alongside 
>> the>>  budgeted expenses it makes envelope-style budgeting very
>>  straightforward in>>  GnuCash.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>  --
>>  Sent from:
>>  http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html>>  
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