Sort of. At least it would give you a monthly total of everything and a roll up of everything, but doesn't handle carry over cleanly. I was suggesting it as a way that works for lots of people but fair enough if it doesn't' fit close enough.
> Your second approach is closer, but it's a fair amount of work (or perhaps I misunderstood it)
It would look like this: Your salary comes in, and instead of matching that transaction to "income" you would split it against a bunch of "envelope" accounts, each however much you want per check. If you use liability accounts (e.g. like an accounts payable account) for this they will count "backwards". This is exactly analogous to envelopes, except that nothing (other than you) stops you from going negative. You can move funds between them whenever you want.
Then when you spent your $100 check you would split that transaction also, and apply the 60/30/10 each to its own account. These carry over of course, so if you don't spend it all this month you'll have extra next month, etc.
I'm aware of that, which is what I meant: If you do it this way, then you can't do envelope budgeting using subaccounts the way the original commenter said (and I agree with you that you should not do it this way).
Both the methods you propose involve significant work on my part, which to me means "Gnucash doesn't support it." For the first method:
> In this way if you overspend in one, and underspend in another, it all rolls up into the same total.
Arguably, this goes against envelope budgeting. The whole analogy is mirroring the physical world, where an envelope cannot go negative. In my envelopes, if one goes negative, then I need to move money from another envelope into it immediately. In your first scenario, since you're using real accounts, we should not do that (otherwise we lose real spending habits data).
Your second approach is closer, but it's a fair amount of work (or perhaps I misunderstood it). Using my example above, if I go to the store and spend $60 on groceries, $30 on supplies and $10 on misc, how do you propose I put that in Gnucash using those liability accounts?
There's always some way to hack it, but when you actually do it for a while, those hacks become tedious. As I said in another comment, the mechanics of envelope budgeting are easy to code, and I'd like the SW to handle those details for me.
I did play with the built-in budget tool. It's like the typical budget tool in most such SW: No carryover of excess budget - you have to manually track it and update it each month.