Automatically adjust GnuCash transactions for envelope budgeting
Project description
Installation
You need the GnuCash Python bindings installed on your computer. If you’ve installed GnuCash through the package manager, you probably already have them. If you’re not sure, just try to install GnuCash Autobudget and it will complain if it can’t find the bindings.
Install:
$ pip install [--user] gnucash_autobudget or $ easy_install [--user] gnucash_autobudget or $ git clone https://github.com/rmoehn/gnucash_autobudget.git $ cd gnucash_autobudget $ sudo python setup.py install
Usage
$ gnucash_autobudget in.gnucash out.gnucash
This will create a file out.gnucash which is the same as in.gnucash except that the transactions for which it applies will have budgeting entries added to them.
Idea
I had been using YNAB for my personal finances, but got fed up, because it doesn’t support accounting in multiple currencies. So I switched to GnuCash, which does support accounting in multiple currencies, but doesn’t have a special function for envelope budgeting (zero-sum budgeting, YNAB budgeting). However, coming from YNAB, envelope budgeting is quite important to me.
Searching the web, I found several implementations of envelope budgeting in GnuCash, but those that appeared ‘clean’ required some manual transaction splitting. This is tedious, especially when your transactions are already bloated with currency adjustment data.
So I take the in my opinion cleanest (I don’t know much about accounting, though) method of envelope budgeting with GnuCash and use GnuCash Autobudget to automatically add budgeting entries to transactions.
Account setup
Please read the Reddit post linked above first and create some transactions according to that method, so that you get a feel for it.
GnuCash Autobudget expects a setup similar to the one shown there:
Assets asset Cash asset Expenses expense mandatory Daily expense Groceries expense Beer expense Transportation expense Monthly expense Rent expense Budget asset mandatory Budgeted Funds liability mandatory Available to Budget asset mandatory Daily asset Groceries asset Transportation asset Monthly asset Rent asset
For GnuCash Autobudget to work, you must have the mandatory accounts and they must have the same name as listed above. The other accounts are only for illustration and you can structure and name them as you want. Note, though, that GnuCash Autobudget relies on the correspondence of subaccount names under Expenses and Budget. Namely…
GnuCash Autobudget only looks at subaccounts of Expenses that have a corresponding subaccount in Budget. So for example, Expenses:Daily:Groceries corresponds to Budget:Daily:Groceries. If there is no corresponding subaccount for an account in Expenses, GnuCash Autobudget will ignore it. For example, it will ignore Expenses:Daily:Beer.
What does it do?
When GnuCash looks through those accounts, it looks for transactions that don’t have a budget entry. Like this:
# debit credit Expenses:Daily:Groceries 100 Assets:Cash 100
It then adds budget entries to them:
Expenses:Daily:Groceries 100 Assets:Cash 100 Budget:Budgeted Funds 100 Budget:Daily:Groceries 100
That means you can record your transactions as usual and GnuCash Autobudget adds the obvious information, so that your budgeting accounts will show the right information. Of course, GnuCash Autobudget won’t touch transactions that already have a budget entry.
Split transactions
GnuCash Autobudget can also deal with split transactions. Input:
Expenses:Daily:Food 70 Expenses:Daily:Drink 10 Assets:Cash 80
Output:
Expenses:Daily:Food 70 Expenses:Daily:Drink 10 Assets:Cash 80 Budget:Budgeted Funds 80 Budget:Daily:Food 70 Budget:Daily:Drink 10
Multi-currency splits work, too. Input:
# debit credit Expenses:Daily:Groceries 2 € Currency Trading:CURRENCY:JPY 250 Assets:Cash:Yen 250 Currency Trading:CURRENCY:EUR 2 €
Output:
Expenses:Daily:Groceries 2 € Currency Trading:CURRENCY:JPY 250 Assets:Cash:Yen 250 Currency Trading:CURRENCY:EUR 2 € Budget:Budgeted Funds 2 € Budget:Daily:Groceries 2 €
Wish list poll
There are some GitHub issues labelled wish list. They denote things I might implement in the future. You can encourage me to implement a certain feature by commenting on the issue. Of course, you can also add items to the wish list.
Copyright and License
See LICENSE.txt.