cashflow forecast with graph
Gnucash needs a robust cashflow forecast with graph, where one can select which accounts and show future cashflow for 30, 90, 180 and 360 days based on scheduled transactions (both credits and debits) that have not yet been entered. e.g. my pay comes every 2 weeks, I get some extra income in June and August that I can estimate, and I have some bills that are every month, others twice a year... I need to know when things will "pile up" requiring a transfer from higher yielding savings accounts into checking. Microsoft Money had a great forecast with a graph so one could identify to the day when balances would run low and plan ahead for transferring money from other accounts. The wiki wishlist for GnuCash has a very detailed explanation of how cash flow forecasting could work, also suggesting the ability to create estimated cashflow from past transactions (which Money could do), but for my part a starting place would be known scheduled transactions that haven't yet been entered. Being able to modify single occurrences of scheduled transactions would also be great without having to edit the entire series (e.g. most months my utility bills are X but I know the electricity bill is higher in the 3 months of summer so).
mx
shared this idea
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Admincstim
(Core Developer, GnuCash)
commented
A prediction of the income/expense due to the scheduled transactions is available as the text report "Future Scheduled Transactions". So in principle your request can already be done. What else would you like to see instead of this already available text report? Please explain and adapt your feature title accordingly. Thanks.
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Rob
commented
Hi. Thank you for your interest in the suggestion.
In the previous program (Quicken) projections are made based on the scheduled transactions. Ideally one could select the asset accounts to include in the forecast and the program would calculate future charges to the selected accounts given the scheduled future transactions and output a month or multi-month line graph with the projected balances for each day. For me it seems implicit that the program would allow me to look ahead. No budget would be required, only the asset accounts and scheduled transactions would be used to project (or guess). Perhaps it would also be helpful to allow one to input in the transaction template if a scheduled transaction is variable or not (eg my cable account is typically the same each month whereas my gas bill varies depending on the seasons). For monthly financial planning and money management this feature would be of great value to me and I suspect to many other users. Please let me know if I can clarify anything further. -
Admincstim
(Core Developer, GnuCash)
commented
Can you please add some explanation as for what exactly should be forecasted? Does that mean you have specified a budget, or the program should implicitly calculate a budget for you and compare this with a forecast? Or how should the program guess what is going on in the future?