Wow, two GnuCash posts in a row... and just yesterday I started out my post saying I haven't written much about GnuCash lately.

Today's post is in response to a recent comment on an earlier post I made about GnuCash's budgeting capabilities:

Hi Mark,

I can't find a way to produce a budget category report like yours. Can you tell me how you did it?

Thanks
Dave

In that post I displayed a screen capture of my GnuCash Budget Categories Report, replicated here:

Here's how I did it
OK, I admit it. I don't really remember the thought process I went through to arrive at the particular combination of steps behind creating this report. It was a while back; and once I had it created and looking like I wanted it I saved it and moved on without further thought. So rather than bore you with what I think were the why's and how's behind this report, I'll just show you all the options settings behind it. By setting all the same options in your GnuCash Budget Reoprt, you should get a report that looks exactly like mine - layout-wise.

The first step might be the critical one. To get to the starting point for this report select Reports | Account Summary from the GnuCash Menu bar. Now click on the Options icon. Everything from this point forward happens in the Account Summary Options dialog box.

As above, in the Accounts tab select all the accounts you want a report about. I changed none of the other options under this tab to achieve the look and layout of my report.

As you might suspect, I also made no changes to the options under the Commodities tab of the Account Summary dialog.

And also, as you'd probably suspect, I made a few changes under the Display tab. When you get to this tab on your report, just replicate these settings and move on to the General tab for the final steps.

In the General options settings tab you'll want to change the Report Name, Stylesheet and Report Title. Changing the name is important because that is the name under which you will save your custom Budget Category Report for future use. If your report is intended to cover a specific time period then you'll also want to change the reporting period here. I've left the reporting period unchanged here because this is only a demonstration report.

Now click OK / Apply and you're done.

All that remains to be done now is to save the report for future use. You accomplish this by clicking the Add Report icon from the icon menu under GnuCash's menu bar.

There you have it. A simple way to produce a fairly elegant report of your Budget Categories in GnuCash. I suppose if there is any magic in this process at all it was at the starting point. The Accounts Summary probably doesn't look like the most logical starting point for a report like this, not when there are other reports in the menu with the word "Budget" in their name. These other reports probably do as good or even better job at certain budgeting tasks, but for my purposes the simple Account Summary report contains as much information as I needed for my report; and that's no doubt the reason behind my choosing it in the first place.