GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 689754
Budget Balance Sheet: Liabilities are calculated incorrectly
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:12:22 UTC
The liabilities amounts on the budget balance sheet are reversed. Compare this to the actual balance sheet. For example: 1. Let's say I have a liability account of $2,400. 2. Run the normal balance sheet report and you will see $2,400 under the liabilities section. 3. Make a payment of $100 to that liability account. (The checking account decreases by $100 [a withdraw] and the liability account decreases by $100 [a decrease in liability]). 4. Re-run the normal balance sheet report and you will see $2,300 under the liabilities section. 5. Now create a budget for 1 year in 12 month intervals. 6. Enter into the budget a payment of $100 to that liability account for all 12 months. (This is entered as -100 in the account, because you are decreasing the liability). 7. Run the budget balance sheet and you will see that the new liabilities field shows an increase of $1,200 in liabilities. This is wrong. It should actually be a decrease of $1,200 in liabilities.
This looks like a user error to me, but I've never user the budget function in anger. If anyone still thinks this is a bug then please reopen it.
Mike, like you I never use the budget function. However there are known issues with signs in that code. Perhaps this report points at one of them. It think we should carefully investigate this before closing.
Having looked at this some more, I tend to agree with Mike. From my (limited) understanding of how budgets work, I think your liability payments should have been entered in the budget as +100, not -100. You'd enter them as -100 in the bank account, so I think you are supposed to enter them of the opposite sign in the liability. Otherwise your book won't balance. If you enter the amounts like that, the Budget Balance Sheet will show the proper values. As I don't know much about the gnucash budgetting feature, I've chosen to consult the experts (that is, actual users) via the mailing list. I'll get back to it based on their replies.
Geert, I just tested this and you are correct, that entering payments on liabilities as positive values in the budget reduces them in the Budget Balance Sheet report. I think I can suspect why though that the OP was entering values the other way. (as negatives) The problem here is that the summary at the bottom of the budget works the opposite way from the Balance Sheet report. If I have say income one month of 1000.00, budgeted expenses of 900.00 and budgeted transfers (liability payments) of 100.00 the Total line should read 0.00. (meaning all income is budgeted) Instead, the Transfers line shows -100.00 and the Total shows 200.00. (which I take to mean I have 200.00 available left to budget from the 1000.00 income) If I change the sign of the budgeted liability payment so it reads -100.00, now the bottom summary is correct, but the Budget Balance Sheet report will be wrong and show an increase in liabilities of 100.00. I also decided to test what happens when changes in assets are budgeted. So I changed expenses to 800.00 and budgeted 100.00 to go to Savings. Now with both the Savings and Liabilities amounts as positive, Transfers is 0.00 (incorrect) and Total is 200.00. (very wrong) But the Balance Sheet is correct. Then I tried paying that Liability by using funds from Savings. (expenses are still 800.00) Now Transfers shows -200.00 and Total shows 400.00! I budgeted to pay a liability with an asset and somehow magically I have 200.00 more to spend! But at least my Balance Sheet is correct. Budgeting changes to Equity or Trading has no effect on the Summary. (Not sure why they even show up in the budget window as I'd never budget anything into those two but someone might have a purpose for doing so) I normally have my Reversed Balance Accounts set to 'credit accounts.' To make sure this wasn't part of the problem, I set it to 'none' and retested. Nothing changed. I don't think the Budget module honors that setting at all and behaves as if it is always 'none.' That would be fine at least if the summary at the bottom of the budget window followed the same rules as the Budget Balance Sheet. From what I can see, I don't think it does, and that is the bug. It would probably be fixed by not translating the positive amounts totaled from the liabilities section into negative numbers when rolling them into Transfers. Then the math would work correctly down there.
Reassign version to 2.4.x so that individual 2.4 versions can be retired.
GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. The new URL for this bug is https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689754. Please continue processing the bug there and please update any external references or bookmarks.