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I have problems budgetting for accounts that contain subaccounts. Gnucash does not seem to want to add the actual values in the subaccount, to get the correct value for the parentaccount, but in stead leaves it at zero.

In my accounts I have asset A, with two subaccounts, B en C:

A
-B
-C

In my budget, I manually fill in values for B and C. Gnucash adds these up, and automatically fills A with the result:

A(100)
-B 80
-C 20

In my transactions, I record transfers to B and C, so that they contain what I specified in the budget.

A 100
-B 80
-C 20

But when I run a budget report, it only displays total for A correctly for the budgetted amount, but leaves the actual amount at zero.

    Budget       Actual
A (100)           0
-B  80           80
-C  20           20

As such, the total for the actual amount for A is wrong. At the very least it's inconsistent to add up the subaccounts for the budgetted, but not for the actual values. Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong here?

1 Answer 1

2

By default gnucash only shows the top level of accounts in the budget. You can make it produce a budget with all accounts but it's fiddly.

To do this:

  1. In the budget view, expand all accounts.
    • Unfortunately there is no easy "View all accounts" option to do this for you; you must do it manually.
  2. When all accounts are expanded, select them all (Ctl-A will work for this).
  3. Now you can push the "Estimate" button in the toolbar.
  4. The resulting estimate still needs tweaking:
    • You must select each "summary" account individually and reset the amount fields with the "All Periods" button.
      • Specifically, leave the "change to" value empty. This will cause the summary line to display the totals of the sub-accounts instead of literal values.
  5. Now you can adjust the budget as needed for the new year.

After you feel like your budget is OK, go ahead and generate a Budget report. Again, you can tweak this to your heart's desire.

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