Missing features: split transactions & sub-categories?

[kasee]

#3433

Hi,

I really like the look of CalendarBudget but am not going to commit to making a purchase until I know if you’re going to introduce what I’d regard as certain key features, split transactions & sub-categories, any time soon? I notice they’ve been mentioned in the forums a while back with a promise that they would appear, but nothing yet’s happened, so can you please shed a little light on this?

BTW, is there a definitive list somewhere of what you’ve got planned for CalendarBudget?

Thanks

Keith

[Eric Poulin]

#3914

Thanks – I appreciate your comment.
Split transactions has been on our list for a while, but for the moment – mobile development has taken all of our development time. We do still plan to implement split transactions but its not likely to happen for several more months.

However, in the mean time, it is very easy to manually split transactions. When you have a transaction come in (from the reconciling assistant) just drag it onto your calendar, then edit it, changing the amount, and create a 2nd transaction for the differing amount. The reconciling assistant is smart enough to recognize when you’ve done this and will count the total balance for the day when looking to see if your day is reconciled.

[ValZho]

#3915

I think the new “split transaction” pop-up is a great stop-gap measure… but we still need full split capabilities—i.e., the total is what shows up on the calendar as a single transaction (necessary for reconciling by hand as some of us still do), but different portions of that amount need to be categorized differently. Thanks for all the continued work!

[Eric Poulin]

#3916

Our thoughts where to keep the split transaction feature as simple as possible. We figured that in most cases the transaction need only be split in 2. In other cases where several splits are necessary, you can simply split off the first “piece from the whole, and then split the remaining “whole” again until you are done.
Did you have a different idea regarding how to implement split transactions?

[wtanksleyjr]

#3917

Speaking for myself:

1. The new feature is pleasant to use.

2. the one thing that surprised me was that bank reconciliation doesn’t work once you split — I expected the split transactions to “remember” where they’d come from and let you reconcile to the original amount, but instead they simply don’t match at all. Hmm. Not optimal. To work around this, I only split after about a week, and I don’t reconcile further back than that… But I’m expecting that to fail any day now, since another thing that can make reconciliation confusing is repeating events where the actual transaction posts late (or doesn’t post at all) so the fake (unreconciled) event appears in the past.

Reconciliation is _hard_ when there are “fake” events on the calendar — because unreconciled events look exactly the same as reconciled ones. Perhaps there might be a better way to display things? Would it be possible to add an icon to events during reconciliation so that it’s possible to quickly see the unreconciled ones?

-Wm

[Eric Poulin]

#3918

You raise a good point. When reconciling we look at 2 things. First, the balance on the day (regardless of the number of entries), so if you balance is right, even if you’ve split the entry it will still consider that day as “reconciled”. If the day balance doesn’t match, we start trying to match individual entries. Here the split would not get recognized. It’s a good idea to have CB try to match a split entry, we’ll add that to our list.

As for marking entries as “reconciled” that was the intent o the “Mark as complete” flag you can set by right clicking on entries – then you see the check marks and know that one is done (helpful for split entries).

[wtanksleyjr]

#3919

Would it be impossible/difficult to line up the CalendarBudget entries alongside the bank entries during reconciliation, so we could simply SEE what CB thinks is reconciled and what isn’t? It’s kind of hard to have to look back and forth between two sets of data that are presented in such different forms.

[Eric Poulin]

#3920

We have some plans to expand the sidebar during certain actions.
While reconciling, we could expand the sidebar and try to line up the transactions – I agree, this would make is way easier.
You are just FULL of excellent ideas :)

THANKS!

[wtanksleyjr]

#3921

Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say… But you’re the one who actually did the work to bring CalendarBudget to life.

I’ve had the same idea rattling for years, and never got farther than design and registering a domain. I’ve worked out the design in considerable detail, and hopefully as the topics arise here on the board the thought I’ve put into it will be somewhat useful. (I’m trying not to dump ideas that aren’t immediately useful to you, since obviously our designs can’t be EXACT matches; my design was to have a calendar but to be centered around “financial objects” like my house, my transportation to work, and so on — the goal was to have the application help you realize when you might be forgetting to pay for something that normally costs money.

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