Budgeting

hledger > balance > Budget report, hledger's built-in periodic budget report
Budgeting and forecasting (2018), a older introduction
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/examples/budgeting, annotated examples of journals implementing budgets
plaintextaccounting.org: Budgeting, more budgeting-related docs, for all PTA tools
Age Your Money, the YNAB (YouNeedABudget) way
https://github.com/zombor/hledger-envelope-budget
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#money-budgeting--management, some other budgeting software for comparison
Time planning -> How to set up a time budget

Notes

 <sm> two commands that are roughly equivalent: ledger budget --add-budget expenses, hledger balance --budget -E expenses
 <sm> they show both budgeted and unbudgeted accounts

--budget has no effect on single-column reports, it requires a reporting interval
--budget INTERVAL enables all periodic transactions with that interval; these can be date-limited
--budget hides all non-budgeted subaccounts; can be depth-limited more

<sm> there's different ways to do budgeting                     [16:46]
<sm> let me try to count them                                   [16:50]
<sm> "envelope budgeting" is analogous to having a set of envelopes containing cash for different purposes. 
You can model the "envelopes" with 
a. real-world accounts (eg your bank lets you create arbitrary savings accounts), 
b. virtual (imaginary) subaccounts of a real-world account (eg your checking account), 
c. virtual accounts "off to the side" (budget:*)
<sm> also you can do the transfers to and from these manually, or generate them with automated posting rules
<sm> "goal budgeting" (best name I can come up with) involves setting some inflow/outflow goals per account per period, 
and then measuring how the actual flows compare with the goals. balance --budget provides this report
<sm> I think that's 7 ways

From https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/doq9p5/new_to_ledger_budgeting_question:

Also search for budgeting links at http://plaintextaccounting.org . You'll see two main approaches discussed:

"envelope budgeting" - sounds more like what you've been doing. Based around explicitly allocating money for each purpose. Good for managing > cashflow. Requires more journal entries. Can be done entirely manually (1a) but many docs advise using automatic posting rules to assist (1b). Many > different ways to handle the details. Requires more thinking.

the other kind ("report-based budgeting" ?). Based around a special budget report provided by Ledger/hledger, which uses periodic transaction > rules to set budget goals. Automatic posting rules might be useful here too, I'm not sure. Provides less enforcement, requires less work. Fewer ways > to do it, perhaps provides simpler/clearer reports.

I often find "budgeting" covers/touches on quite a lot of topics:

setting earning/spending goals,

reviewing performance against those goals,

controlling earning/spending based on the goals,

allocating funds for short term expenses,

allocating funds towards savings goals,

updating allocated funds as transactions occur,

reallocating funds/balancing the budget,

end of period actions (roll over ? reset ?),

forecasting cash balances and managing cashflow,

forecasting income/expenses...

hledger

Budgeting

All budgeting-related docs

Notes