New Reports

[Eric Poulin]

#3340

From an email conversation:

It would be very useful to have a bar chart (or line chart) displaying account projected balance for current month, 3, 6 months or whole year.

[Obelix]

#3606

That sounds like a neat idea.  i would go for the line chart with expenses line and income line so you could easily see where they intersected.  It seems like it should be easy to just have 1 chart that showed an entire year(or more?) projected.  Projection for a month is easily seen on the calendar itself.  Projections for shorter than a year will look the same as for a year and just leave empty space on the plot.

Also would be interesting to consider allowing more than one account on a chart.  If, for example, you had a money market account that is used for tucking savings into as an emergency fund, by setting up a repeating entry to move money to that account, you could look at it’s projected growth along with your regular cashflow lines.  Have to think about that one.  It might cause more grief (for Eric)than it’s worth, but it could be handy for some people.  Anyone else think multi-account plots might be useful?

Over all, the chart is a good idea I think.

[Eric Poulin]

#3607

Another option is – when I add the aggregate account tab (showing all account activity in 1 tab) the reports will be in the context of all accounts in aggregate. 
I will need to think through this more since categories are actually distinct for each account. 

Perhaps the aggregate account tab will need its own special set of reports.

[Obelix]

#3608

I think I would skip trying to align categories between accounts.  just show the total balances.  You could even do this from individual accounts, including the local categories and then include only the account totals of other accounts as desired on a trending plot.  That would almost play towards the net worth plots I posted about.

[Eric Poulin]

#3609

Just tying up loose ends here.
I ended up making budget categories global (same and shared for all of the accounts you create).  This makes understanding your finances much cleaner and reporting is easier to understand.

[Obelix]

#3610

You did that (and very nicely too), but the original suggestion is still not implemented.  There is no way to graphically see your budget forecast out over the next year.  All that is available is looking back at the last 6 months.  It seems like it shouldn’t be too much trouble to take the 6 months plot and push it out forward instead of backwards.  What I’d rather see, tho, is just my daily totals from each account pushed forward 6 months or a year.  You could take the 6 month plot, push it forward, and simply use the accounts as the checkbox categories.  You’d have to allow for negative values tho since the current plot looks like it is grounded at $0. 

[Eric Poulin]

#3611

Yes, thanks for bringing the discussion back to the point.
I agree – the report suggestions are good, and not hard to deliver. 
I’ve added these report suggestions to our development plan – hopefully they’ll be available before we exit beta.
Feel free to add more report suggestions here – we’re open to thoughtful ideas.

[rinahatcher]

#3612

Two ideas that would help me, personally:

1) custom reports

2) or, reports broken down by paydays / income days.

Previously, before finding Calendar Budget, I was doing custom things in Excel, which worked well but lacked the calendar layout and the online aspect. I usually broke everything down by payday, so every Friday or every-other Friday, I could see what I had planned to come out of each grouping of income. It’s not necessary, but just another visual way to break down spending.

thanks!
Rina

[Eric Poulin]

#3613

I like the idea of having reports span user-set timeframes, such as paydays or start_date -> end_date.

Regarding custom reports – even a custom report has to have some guidelines. How do you envision a custom report being created? In a previous life, I worked with eCommerce analytics and I’ve seen some atrocious interfaces for custom report building and would hate to reproduce a complicated interface.

[Obelix]

#3614

Why not start simple and use a radio button option to select 1)start/end date or 2)recurring payment/income timeframe.

start/end date options are obvious.  Recurring payment/income shows a list of recurring payments that are in play(I assume you can show just those).  User selects one of those to chart within.  Once they have selected which one, they are given a drop list of cycle dates to use as the start date.  Then you add a field for number of cycles to show. 

Hi Eric 8)

[Eric Poulin]

#3615

Interesting idea about being able to report on only recurring entries.
I’m wondering about the utility of such a report. I’m having difficulty thinking of a good use-case for it. For example, would I ever want to see just my recurring entries isolated from others? Not sure…

Or, are you suggesting that a report would show all data between a date range with start/end date range being either a) arbitrary or b) based on existing recurring event periods? The later could be challenging to understand – if I have an entry that repeat every week… will every week in the past/future be in a drop down?

I think I need more details to understand you properly.

[Obelix]

#3616

I guess I was kind of thinking of large monthly recuring expenses/income like monthly payday, or mortgage.  I was also assuming (dangerous, I know) that it would be a month long report but essentially starting on the date of the recuring expense.  Then showing forward it would simply roll over on that date instead of the first of the month.  Not sure how that would really be useful tho now that I think about it.  Most bills are monthly not weekly as you said.

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