In microsoft.public.money, TB Booher wrote:

- quote -

That sounds like the kind of thing you would get from the various
portfolio views -- how your return on investment is going. "spending
.... converting income dollars to capital dollars" sounds like
investment to me.

- quote -

The article offered in
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q...04&safe=images
may offer some insight. It seems to have helped Derrick. I don't use
a budget.

O.K. from reading a lot of posts, it seems like a good understanding of what
budget accounts are is needed for a lot of us. Personally, I don't
understand why there are the lines, transfers into budget accounts and
transfers out of budget accounts in the first place. I just want my budget
to tell me to what degree my spending is converting income dollars to
capital dollars not how much money has moved around this month in all my
accounts. The most I would want would be an FYI telling me that some of my
money is no longer in an account that I am tracking with my budget.
Especially bad is that these transfers are counted as total expenses at the
top line, which has confused me and a lot of posters. However, I have faith
in the Microsoft developers that they have thought about this and it is my
lack of understanding that is the problem here. With that in mind, I set up
some dummy accounts and here is what I found:

Key: Out = Transfers out of budget accounts
In = Transfers into budget accounts

Transfer from Budget Checking to 'Non-Budget' Checking = In
Transfer from Non-Budget checking to Budget checking = Out
(This makes sense.)

From Retirement account (can't seem to change budget settings on this one)
to Budget Investment account = In
(so this must mean that a retirement account can not be a budget account)
From Investment Budget Account to Budget Checking Account = In
(this isn't into budget accounts, it is between two of them, it's not in the
'out of budget accounts line'. why can't this be listed as income?)
Sale from Investment Non Budget Account to Non Budget Checking account: Not
listed

This is starting to make sense . . . but there is still an ominous cloud of
confusion that hangs over all of this for me (and I suspect many others.) Is
there a definitive way to understand all of this. Perhaps, there is a
Microsoft white paper on Money's budget model and a comprehensive
description of what is going on here. The included help file has too many
top level things that don't get to the meat of what is going on under the
hood and how to manage a complex budget.

Thanks,

Tim Booher