This is an accounting question more than anything, methinks.

The problem statement:

• I want to budget my expenditures. This is simply enough done, although KMyMoney appears to lack granularity of less than one month in budgeting. I should probably file a bug report asking for weekly budgeting periods.
• I want to be able to see the accrual of available funds within a budget category over a given course of time, in a fashion very similar to that of the forecast min/max balance.
• I would like to be able to budget on a general category and have it drill down on expenditures.

To me, this sounds like something similar to what happens with scheduled transactions.

The “hack” I can think of would use a dummy account that mirrors my total income and transfers from that dummy account to the budgeted expense accounts. If drill-down doesn't happen automatically then I'd have to do it manually. I would set up scheduled transactions to handle this information. The problems with this hack are:

• Any accountant reviewing my books would shudder, cringe, twitch, suffer a myocardial infarction followed immediately by an aneurysm, then proceed to haunt me and my family for three generations for having allowed such a travesty upon the earth.
• I would not have an accurate representation of my current financial state.

From what little I've been able to glean, it sounds to me like I'm looking for something vaguely resembling cash flow analysis. Be that as it may, I'm looking for a solution that involves using KMyMoney, and would appreciate any insight that can be given.

Many thanks!

Budget is limited to monthly/yearly by design. Any bug filed on that should be a wishlist, and come with a good amount of reasons on why to have such a granularity.

if you want to budget a general category, and then file expenses to subcategories, check the "Include subcategories". You can even budget a specific subcategory of the parent category if need be.

Regarding the accrual, check the budget reports. Budget vs Actual is what you are looking for, I think. Other budget reports may come handy.

Hei Ku wrote:Budget is limited to monthly/yearly by design. Any bug filed on that should be a wishlist, and come with a good amount of reasons on why to have such a granularity.

If you don't mind, where could I find a discussion on the reasoning behind the monthly/yearly limitation? This would help me ensure that any reasoning I might have for biweekly or weekly budgeting hasn't already been addressed.

Hei Ku wrote:if you want to budget a general category, and then file expenses to subcategories, check the "Include subcategories". You can even budget a specific subcategory of the parent category if need be.

Excellent.

Regarding the accrual, check the budget reports. Budget vs Actual is what you are looking for, I think. Other budget reports may come handy.

That seemed to be the direction I was leaning towards. Am I correct in recalling that there is a BVA forecast available that takes SX into consideration?

Many thanks,

The discussion took place 2 years ago on the kmymoney2 mailing list. You should browse the archives, or you can just present your arguments. As I said, you should have a good amount of reasons.


There is an option to setup a budget based on the forecast, if that's what you mean.

Hei Ku wrote:The discussion took place 2 years ago on the kmymoney2 mailing list. You should browse the archives, or you can just present your arguments.

Thank you for the information. I'll be sure to take a look at that.

Hei Ku wrote:There is an option to setup a budget based on the forecast, if that's what you mean.

Actually no… I was thinking more along the lines of a budget forecast. I know that budgeting only covers expense and income accounts, and in order for me to do the analysis I want to do, I would need not only the budget in the analysis, but also the scheduled transactions which handle the transfers to liability accounts. The distinct possibility exists that I'm overcomplicating matters as well.

Many thanks, once again. This conversation continues to help me.

Liabilities are not covered, but if you use forecast to setup the budget, that will include the scheduled transactions (if you use the scheduled forecast method)