Summary: Altering the budgeted amount for any equity account fails to be reflected in the "Total" line at the bottom of the budget window. Proposed solution: incorporate the amounts budgeted in equity accounts in the total for the "Transfers" subtotal line at the bottom of the budget screen. Alternate possible solution: add a new subtotal line labeled "Equity" at the bottom of the budget screen, which is in turn reflected in the "Total" at the very bottom of the screen. Detailed description of the problem: Unlike Asset, Expense, Liability or Income accounts, changing budget amounts in Equity accounts fails to cause any subtotal line at the bottom of the budget window to be updated (i.e. Income, Expenses, or Transfers) and is therefore also not reflected in the over overall "Total" line for the relevant month and for the year. Here's a use case where this bug causes problems: For employees whose pensions accumulate by having an employer match the employee's contribution on every paycheck, the dominant suggestion from the gnucash-user list is to handle by having the employee contribution enter a pension asset account via an employee income account, and having the employer contribution enter the pension asset account via an equity account. It is currently impossible to reflect this in a budget: an accurate forecast of employer contributions accumulating in both an asset account and an equity account leads to a decrease in the "Total" lines, when in fact it shouldn't affect the budget totals at all. If, on the other hand, the budget ignores the employer contribution, then the budget will add up, but asset reports will diverge from the budget in that the pension account will accumulate beyond what the budget forecast.
Fixed in GnuCash 3.6 thanks to a contribution from Adrién Panella.
(In reply to macho.p from comment #0) > Here's a use case where this bug causes problems: For employees whose > pensions accumulate by having an employer match the employee's contribution > on every paycheck, the dominant suggestion from the gnucash-user list is to > handle by having the employee contribution enter a pension asset account via > an employee income account, and having the employer contribution enter the > pension asset account via an equity account. Macho.p sorry for a late query regarding your use case, what exactly do you mean by "having the employer contribution enter the pension asset account via an equity account" -- would you like to illustrate via a sample payroll transaction please? The reasoning is the budget equity value is somewhat difficult to grasp and we need to fix an internal bug in budgets. Here's my understanding of an employee monthly payroll transaction. Assume annual salary = $60,000, the employer withholds 20% PAYE tax; the employee contributes 9% and the employer matches it. How/why would yours require an equity account? Income:GrossSalary -$5,000 Expense:Taxes:PAYE $1,000 Income:EmployerMatching -$450 Asset:Pension $900 (includes employer $450 and employee $450) Asset:Bank $3,550
I've been essentially doing this: Income:GrossSalary -$5,000 Expense:Taxes:PAYE $1,000 Equity:EmployerMatching -$450 Asset:Pension $900 (includes employer $450 and employee $450) Asset:Bank $3,550 I've been doing it for so long, though that I no longer fully remember why I felt the need to do this rather than your solution. In my case, the employer contribution is not taxable, so perhaps that is why I wanted to separate it from my other income, but I suppose I could just make a separate income stream for non taxable income.
Thank you macho.p for explaining your use case. It would seem that this is a hack which is not truly necessary, and would prematurely affect the balance sheet equity section. I'd think using an income account would be much more correct accounting-wise. Some employers can offer additional pre-tax benefits (these are called Fringe Benefits in Australia) e.g. health insurance, car, meal allowance. These are all technically income, and are reported to accountant as such, and the latter will calculate exact allowances. Would you object to reversing the change in this bug, and use the correct accounting equation instead? The Equity:EmployerMatching would easily be reparented to an income account and account type changed to INCOME. Income:GrossSalary -$5,000 Income:Nontaxable:Employer Benefit -$450 Expense:Taxes:PAYE $1,000 Asset:Pension $900 (includes employer $450 and employee $450) Asset:Bank $3,550
@macho: can you confirm with your book that: * Are your budget equity amounts signed NEGATIVE when you're budgeting the employer contributions? Please reply to fix the budgets issue once and for all.
(In reply to Christopher Lam from comment #5) > @macho: can you confirm with your book that: > > * Are your budget equity amounts signed NEGATIVE when you're budgeting the > employer contributions? > > Please reply to fix the budgets issue once and for all. Hi. I moved away from my old approach for my 2020 budget. But looking back at my old split transactions, Income:GrossSalary and Equity:EmployerMatching are signed positive under the "TotIncome" column, and the changes the remaining accounts are signed positive under the "TotCharge" column. Does that answer what you are asking here?
Maybe; it would be useful to know which version you are using shows budget equity amounts being positive. 3.7/3.8/3.9/3.10; according to your use case above the budget amounts should internally be negative. In any case I'm really trying to fix it finally for 3.11; there will be NO more changes after 3.11.
Oops, sorry I just realized my answer actually wasn't relevant to your question: I was giving the transaction details rather than telling you what's happening in the budget dialog. In the budget dialog, I think all of the numbers are positive. In any event, I just checked and in my current version, it looks like changing the budget equity amount is reflected in "transfers" subheading at the bottom and thus also in the "totals", so it looks like the initial bug I reported here has been resolved. I'm currently on 3.7 (Build ID: 3.7+(2019-09-07)) Hopefully that information is more helpful to you.
That's fine. If your budget income amounts and budget equity amounts are both positive, and both relate to "income" or "employer benefit", I'll conclude that in the budget viewer (i.e. the grid), budget equity amounts are handled similar to income amounts. This bug being fixed (i.e. budget equity influences Transfer total) is orthogonal to my query, and I'm not sure should have been fixed in the first place; it makes no sense financially to budget an amount to/from equity accounts. This is why the original budget designer did not include equity amounts in the budgets. This conclusion will be FINAL. I will direct any complaints from future budget equity users to this bug. I'll be happy to consider this issue closed; the 3.11 release *will* handle budget equity amounts as "similar to income", and handle budget amounts exactly as 3.7. Hopefully 4.x will feature a much more robust budget.
