Reasoning behind not allowing budgets on transfers

[ClementRoyer]

Hi! First of all, thank you for Firefly III. I've been using the project and I really appreciate the work that has gone into it. It's a very useful tool and clearly a lot of thought has been put into it.

I had a question about budgets and transfers. From what I’ve seen in several discussions and issues, adding budgets to transfers seems to be something that is intentionally not supported. I was wondering what the reasoning behind this is. Is it mainly a technical limitation, or more of a design choice because it doesn’t conceptually fit how transfers are supposed to work in Firefly III?

The reason I'm asking is that I'm currently planning holidays with friends and had to transfer money to them for accommodation. In Firefly III I keep these as transfers to asset accounts (one per friend), which works well to track who owes what. However, because it’s a transfer, I can’t assign my “holiday” budget to it, so the expense isn’t deducted from that budget.

Thanks in advance for your time and for any clarification you can provide.

[JC5]

It's a conceptual thing, if all asset accounts are yours than a transfer has no influence on your budget. In your case, I would make expense accounts for your friends, not asset accounts.

Having said that, if you create Reports (under /reports) and exclude an asset account, a transfer to that account will still count as an "expense".

[ClementRoyer]

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense from a conceptual and accounting perspective.

I'll try modeling my friends as expense accounts and see how that works with my holiday budget.

Thanks again for taking the time to clarify this.