Home Forums Feature Wish List New Category Type: Savings Re: Re: New Category Type: Savings

Obelix
Participant
Post count: 48

Oh.  This is my savings thread.  Duh.

Ok, I stand by everything I said in the last post and disavow all knowledge of of the secondary portion of the original post.  I think having “Goals”  that are free form are much better than trying to tie every penny into some type of “Savings” structure.

Goals should have an easy way to add money to them.  This probably would work best as an entry type tied to the specific goal.  I don’t think that trying to deal with the original goal item entry would be very efficient unless you made it acessible from the category layout area.  Even that would force a change in the current method of operation.  Plus tying goals to specific events would probably fit in just fine with your current data structure.  it would just act as a positive income event does now, only it would relate to the goal only and not the daily amount.

Goals should have an easy way to decrement against them.  This would probably play into the current entry structure.  Just add a drop down list of Goals that the entry can be applied against defaulting to “none”.  Entries apply against the daily balance and against the Goal they have set(if any).

Some issue in my mind as to the best way to decrement a goal if the decrement isn’t a real expense.  Like if I wanted to move money from my “New TV” goal to my “New Clothing” goal because I decided I needed new boots soon for work.  The money didn’t go anywhere yet, but it moved.  Would that transaction require 1 entry?  Two?  Should it be easier than that by letting the user have free reign over the amount a goal contained through a straight text value field they could adjust like the current entry setup has?  A true free form goal would work that way.  Depends on how much structure you want to force the user into to gain the advantage of a money trail to come back to in the future.

You could have a second entry type that only played with goals.  This could be used to move money between two goals, or could be created instead of applying an expense entry to a goal.  This would happen where you had one expense entry but covering two or more goals.  like if I wrote a single check for both my new TV and my new shoes when I go to Sears.  Being able to split the expense will be a necessary function I think.  So having a second entry type that was specific to goals will be necessary.  I wouldn’t force a goal change entry on creating a regular, single goal expense tho.  That way going back and changing the value (or changing a future value that you now know the true value of) also changes the effect on the goal.  Splitting into multiple goal entries still would pose a challenge if there was a change that was applied to the true expense entry.  The user would have to deal with the double goal entries anyways by hand.  I think for now you will have to leave them hanging and make them change the goal entry values by hand to match the expense entry.  Maybe later you could add some type of link from the expense entry to the related goal entries, but that would force you do handle the multiple goal entries from the expense entry setup screen.

Man getting long again.  What do you think so far?