Mark Items as Completed or Planned… and interface for those

[ValZho]

#3444

Add a “Planned” Flag
I just found the “Mark as Completed” option in the contextual menu. Yay! This brings up another issue for me though—something that is really needed in the sprawling view of CalendarBudget (sprawling is good): a “planned” payment tag. One needs to be able to differentiate between items that you put on the calendar that are planned, and items that have been paid but are waiting to clear the bank. This “planned” flag is especially pertinent to repeating items. When set, this flag should make the item dim or italic or something along those lines rather than adding an icon like a completed item (IMO).

Add Flag Toggles to Item Editor
In addition to right-clicking on an item, one needs to be able to set these flags (via radio button) in the item/entry editor. That way, one can make a repeating item with a flag of “planned”.

Make Flags More Consistent
Perhaps its a bug, but it seems to me that the “Mark Complete” flag is tied to the view and not the transaction. So, if I have transaction X in account A and mark it complete when viewing A, the complete flag disappears when I go to view all accounts… I have to reflag it in that view separately. Also, if I have a transfer X from account A to account B, marking it complete while viewing account A should also mark complete the corresponding item when viewing account B, but it does not.

[Eric Poulin]

#3945

We didn’t notice the “Mark as paid” flag not working in the All Accounts tab – we’ll check that out. That would be a bug we should fix.
We’ll consider the other ideas – we don’t want to make the edit dialog too cluttered with a ton of options.

[wtanksleyjr]

#3946

I don’t think I understand the purpose of the “planned” flag. Is it kind of like a “to do” marker? Would it be adequate if CalendarBudget gave us a way to query for all items with the “remind” button checked? (The idea _seems_ kind of similar, if the words mean what I think they do…)

It might be REALLY nice if “remind” items changed color as their remind date approached and passed — yes, I get emails, but why not also make the item stand out on CalendarBudget?

[Eric Poulin]

#3947

Thanks for the question.
The “Mark as completed” flag is an optional mark on an entry saying, “this actually happened”. It was meant to be used when reconciling to say “this happened in my account on the right date for the right amount – its reconciled”. Its useful when you have a day that has a bunch of entries and you’re trying to figure out which items have been correctly reconciled and while haven’t.

As for changing the color for remind me items… do you mean if you had an entry set to be reminded 3 days before, it would change color 3 days before? When would it change back to normal? We don’t want to force people to use the “Mark as complete” flag. Many use it, but not everyone. Could you explain a little more how you envision this being used?

[wtanksleyjr]

#3948

I read more forum comments about the “Completed” flag, and found that was how you’d designed it to be used. I’ll change my use of the flag to match the expected use — which makes perfect sense to me. I was previously using it “wrong” :D. I’d love to see it automatically marked on all reconciled items — although I admit that not everybody would “love” that, you have to admit that this WAS a previously planned feature (I found you talking about adding it). Ha, gotcha!  :)

As for changing color on “remind me” items: the purpose is to make it so that I can see what items are calling for my attention. No longer would I get an email, then have to scrounge around trying to figure out which item was whining  ;D … instead I’d just look and SEE. And if I couldn’t take action right away, I could just get back to it later — the item would still be highlighted next time.

The highlighting would hold until the user edited the item to change the “remind me”, either by unchecking it or by changing the “remind me” date to sometime later. If the user forgets, who cares — you MIGHT add a clickable report for “remindable” items, or expired items, but I doubt anyone would really mind once the month isn’t being viewed anymore.

In hindsight changing the color is probably the WORST idea for this (whoops), since categories can also change the color, and that would be confusing. Making the item bold, italic, adding a ! warning icon, bolding the outline… Tons of better possibilities.

Best of all, this doesn’t add any new UI — it simply makes the existing UI more visibly effective.

-Wm

[ivicaSD]

#3949

I think marking of items that have a reminder is a good idea!

wtanksleyjr: you are right, changing colours would be confusing, but bolding the text, or putting small alarm picture next to it would be convinient.

I also think there should be some option to mark multiple items as “Completed”, since I have a lot items per day, some DAY COMPLETED or even WEEK COMPLETED would be very useful in my case… :)

[ivicaSD]

#3950

One more IDEA on this topic (since I have a need for option like this) :

REPORTS should have some filter (simple checkbox, or radiobutton), which decides whether to use unmarked items for making a report or not.

Example: I look at my CATEGORY SPENDING report for this month, and I see COMPLETED items together with PLANNED ones. I would like to separate them and look at single report for COMPLETED items, or single report for PLANNED ones.

[wtanksleyjr]

#3951

Yes, it has to be easier to mark multiple items as completed, and easier to see which items are completed and which aren’t. It’s just a _pain_.

One solution would be to modify the Javascript to allow multiple items to be marked complete in close order, even if the server hasn’t finished handling the previous ones, so we don’t have to click-click-wait.

The worst thing to me, though, is that when your forecast is perfect and you import new items, the new items that match are HIDDEN from the bank, making it very hard to know for sure which items should be marked as complete. IF “complete” means “matched with the bank”, which is the recommended way and the only way that is really reliable, it’s very important that it be reasonably easy to set! I’m thinking that it should be set _automatically_ whenever a downloaded transaction is hidden due to an exact matchup; alternately, an item that’s not marked complete shouldn’t be hidden even if it matches (but perhaps color it blue or white rather than red or green, and allow single-click to mark its matching item as complete).

[Eric Poulin]

#3952

Hey, that’s a great idea – when reconciling, CalendarBudget could automatically mark the entry as complete.

[wtanksleyjr]

#3953

Hey, that’s a great idea – when reconciling, CalendarBudget could automatically mark the entry as complete.

I’d love to take credit, but some other guy thought of it first (It’s you.  ;D.)

But seriously, I’d like to see something like that — balancing is just _really_ hard when you have one item that’s not present in the bank’s record (because it’s a repeating bill that you forgot to pay, for example) but multiple items aren’t marked as complete. Sometimes the most important errors that should be glaring are actually almost invisible.

-Wm

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