I'm evaluating KMyMoney after being a gnucash user for many years. While it has some faults, my only real gripe with gnucash was its poor budgeting capabilities.

KMyMoney seems to care a bit more about budgets, but it's still heavily constrained and I'm not sure if I can use it for my needs. For example, it seems to do budgets on an annual basis and you lose your budget information when the new year begins.

Let me state what I'd like - perhaps someone knows a way to get KMyMoney to do this. Heck, if there's a neat solution where I can export data from KMyMoney elsewhere to handle this - that'll work too - assuming it's easy and somewhat automated.

Let's say I budget a monthly amount for various categories (eating out, groceries, movies, etc).

Rolling Balance

I want it to keep a "rolling balance" for each category. For example, let's say I budget $100/mo for eating out.

Month 1: I spend $80

Then in the beginning of Month 2, it should show my budget for that month as $120. If I spend $40 by the 10th of Month 2, it should show $80 left in my budget for month 2.

Let's say I go crazy and spend $140 on outside food for Month 2.

Then Month 3 should show a budget of $80.

Balance Transfer

Let's say 7 months into all of this, I notice that I spend a lot less than expected on outside food (my balance at the end of each month is positive and growing), but more than I expected on entertainment (I'm in the "red"). I realized that I didn't budget things well, so I'd like to modify my budget and transfer some of the surplus in eating out to entertainment.

KMyMoney lets me do this by simply letting me adjust my budget retroactively. This is not a problem.

Truly Rolling Budget

My budget (and most importantly, my "balance") shouldn't disappear at the end of the year! This really disappoints me in KMyMoney. For me, delineating a year is arbitrary.

Simple Reports

I need a quick way to see my budget "balance" for my current month for different categories. With KMyMoney reports, to get the actual cumulative balance, I have to have it report all months in my budget, and scroll all the way to the right to see the balance. Too much noise.

The-Feature-I'd-Really-Like-Which-I'm-Sure-I'll-Never-Get

In the beginning of Month 3 (which happens to have 30 days) I have $90 in my balance for eating out. After 10 days I've used up $32. I'm spending more than I should per day ($3/day). So when I check my system on the 11th day, it should suggest I spend only $1 that day. There can be many variations/alternations to this, but the bottom line is that I'd like some kind of a warning that at this rate I'll exceed my budget, with an actual metric to give me an idea how far I am beyond the expected amount of spending.

At the moment, I'm at a loss as to whether I should switch. The interface and online banking options are really nice, as are some search/filtering capabilities, but budgeting was my main hope. I'll probably evaluate other programs, but it's a pain to do so.

KMyMoney seems to be one of the most active projects for financial applications, so I feel that if I switch to something else, I'll probably switch again to KMyMoney in the future - a hassle I'd like to avoid.

I toyed with Skrooge today. It seems their budget can do some of what I want (at least is not limited to one year), but I really couldn't figure it out, and it's not in their handbook.

Thoughts? Is anyone else interested in this? Should I bother filing a bug as a wishlist item?

Thanks

Beetle B. wrote:I toyed with Skrooge today. It seems their budget can do some of what I want (at least is not limited to one year), but I really couldn't figure it out, and it's not in their handbook.

You are right, skrooge already has "Rolling Balance", "Balance Transfer", "Truly Rolling Budget". To use it, you just have to declare some rules in "Budget" page.

Regards