GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 452716
Budget Feature for personal finances
Last modified: 2018-06-29 21:41:12 UTC
Suppose I setup a budget with all the income and expenses I expect to have each bi-weekly period (ex. salary, cell phone bill, car payment, etc). I'd like the budget screen to calculate per bi-weekly period: (remainder of last bi-weekly period) + (income - expenses) = remainder and display that number at the bottom of the budget period column (or somewhere). * the first bi-week period of the budget would use the current actual balance of my accounts instead of the "remainder of last bi-weekly period", as it's the first and there is no remainder from a previous calculation. Then if this remainder starts going into the negative, I know that my budget is not realistic in terms of how much I currently have, how much I'm going to make and how much I'm planning on spending bi-weekly. My assumption is that this could be bi-weekly or in whatever increments the budget is configured for. I hope this is easy to understand and I can't thank you enough for this software!!!!!
Budgets are annoyingly complicated. Looking through a lot of the information on the wiki about it, I think there has been a lot of different views expressed about how they should work over the past 10+ years. My understanding of Don's intent by filing this bug is that he wants to know at the end (or during) each budget period exactly how he is doing against his set budget. There is a lot more involved here too - what happens with the remainder at the end of the period? For example if I don't spend this fortnights budget allocation amount, should this budgeted remainder be carried forward to next fortnight's budget? Or simply disappear? Or should we let the user decide how it is handled on an account by account basis? My initial first instinct was that this is what reports are for, but I think it is a bit tedious to have to continually run reports for this kind of information. I'm going to post to the user mailing list to see if people can give me some user cases for how they want to do budgeting. From there, I'll be able to post here with a better idea of what we want to implement. At this stage, I'm thinking of trying to alter the gui so that it shows the budgeted amount (that can be changed) with the actual amount (pulled from the account) and a 'difference' between them (calculated by the software upon change). Also thinking of trying to add in a setting where you can choose to either carry forward remainders or have them disappear, on a whole of budget basis. Thoughts are very appreciated! I'm not the most experienced programmer, so the more guidance, the better. Additionally, I haven't fully scoped out how much effort these changes would make, so it may be beyond my ability. We'll see.
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