[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Categories Across Multiple Accounts #3653

At the moment any category can be flagged an typically an “income” or “expense” category.  This distinction is used to group the categories, and in fact reverse the count on the category.
For Income categories, the “budget” is a target you hope to reach.
For Expense categories, the “budget” is the maximum you should spend.
Probably we’ll keep tis distinction.  We’ve discussed having sub-categories in the past with roll-up totals.  We’ll probably do that eventually, but not any time soon, simply because there are other higher priority features.

Regarding transfers – having a single set of categories across all of your accounts nicely facilitates the target account entry.  I’m liking the single instance of categories more and more.  Perhaps, I’ll do that now in combination with transfers (before releasing transfers) since it will make things much simpler.  Unfortunately the next system upgrade will be pushed until next week, but its for the best I think.  I’ve discussed this with the other half of the design team and I’m going to go ahead with making categories a single global entity.

Also, funny enough… the current entry dialog DOES have an account field allowing you to create/move entries to other accounts.  However, I have *just* removed it as part of the transfer feature.  The account field is just clutter on the entry dialog, it never gets used.  Behaviorally, people won’t create a transaction unless they are “in” that account and thus seeing the surrounding context.  I originally thought it was a good idea as mentioned by Obelix, however, noone is using it, including me – its just another field to have to tab through.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Categories Across Multiple Accounts #3650

Sorry, I think I wasn’t clear in my last post.  The idea of the multi-column sidebar is only as an expandable (expanding to the right) option.  You may expand it temporarily while reviewing budget spending, it would likely hover over the calendar, not shrink it.  The normal view would be pretty much as it is today, with the category spending showing spending for your entire finances, not just the current account.
In fact, it just dawned on me… to make this more visually clear, the Account Tabs would  start AFTER the category side bar – so the category side bar would not be specific to any account, but a global shared entity.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: New Category Type: Savings #3658

For now, assume I am a coding genius and can do anything.  The only limitations should be user experience and doing the right thing.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Categories Across Multiple Accounts #3648

You bring up a good point – that being – if categories are shared across accounts, they *should* also share the amount and contributions to it.  In fact, this is the best way to budget.  You budget your money based on your income, not based on the number of accounts you have.  Our goal is more to encourage good personal finance, less to have a flexible tool.

The only visual problem is… now we have categories that will say you have, say, $100 spent, but its not clear where its been spent if that spending is not in the current account.

The planned aggregate account view will take care of that, but viewing a specific account will have its drawbacks. 

We had thought if having the category side bar be expandable to the right, show more details about your plan vs actual spending.  We could simply have 1 column for plan, and x columns for actual, 1 for each account and show its contribution to that category’s activity. 

  This will be a bit of a mess to convert all existing users accounts to – but I think the net results will be positive.

Thoughts community?

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: New Category Type: Savings #3656

We hope to get to that point in the not too distant future.  Part of what we’ve been discussing is setting savings goals on categories – which makes more sense in an account designated as a “savings” account.

I’m interested in hearing your ideas on this topic.  We’ve only had early discussion on this topic over the past half-year so we’re still very much in the early planning stages of this particular topic.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Categories Across Multiple Accounts #3646

Does it make more sense to copy categories from one of your accounts, or just have all your categories common across accounts.  Having common categories would certainly simplify aggregate reporting.  Is the flexibility of having different categories in each account necessary?

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Future daily values #3644

Yes, the idea was to change the TODAY indicator to a more distinct and obvious indicator.  It was barely noticeable before.  Now its very obvious, as are the previous and next months.

I’m thinking to leave the entry text itself (in previous and next months) as normal black(red) so they are readable.  If we gray the background *and* the entry, it will be harder to read.  The cell background gray should be indicator enough that something is different about those days.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Future daily values #3642

How does this suit your fancy? (see attachment)

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Future daily values #3641

You’re hilarious.  :D
We designed CalendarBudget to have days in the previous and next month slightly grayed to help highlight the current month, taking that the visual cue from Google Calendar and other calendaring programs. 
I agree that the “today” indicator needs some work.  Even to me, its annoyingly not noticeable.  That should be a simple fix – I’ll get that in next weeks drop – along with Account Transfers.
An alternative to graying out the entries themselves to to gray out the background of the day.  This will make the distinction between current month and not even more apparent, and should make the day contents more visible. I’d prefer not to change things onmouseover, since it makes at a glance viewing difficult.  Also, the mouseover calculation can get very expensive on your browser processing. 

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Forum Links #3637

This is now done with a code refresh this morning

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Business Account #3640

Obelix,

It may be the case that I won’t focus on complicated business requirements, but I’d like to gather any need and requirements and make that decision.  If there are some simple requirements that can make CalendarBudget useful for small business owners, I’d like to understand them.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Business Account #3638

Are there any special needs that a business account would have versus what is standard in CalendarBudget.
The only thing that our design team has come up with in previous discussions is a budget count down.  Let me explain:

Imagine you have a marketing budget (either annually or for a specific time period or event).  Rather than the current budget system which tallies your spending monthly, you want this budget to start at $X and count down until the event or period is over. So, for example, if you had a $5,000 marketing budget for the year, you’d want it to start at $10,000 and show you how much you have left on each month according to spending so far in the year. 
This type of budgeting system works great for any special event also.  We have this in our plans – its just a matter of prioritizing it.  So far, its only been a design discussion – noone has asked for it.

Anything other wants for a business budgeting system?

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Forum Links #3636

Forum link updated.
Will try to get those links in the CalendarBudget menus updated for the next update.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Import format (QIF/OFX)? #3632

We’ve decided that, for now, we’re going to go with the approach of exporting the transaction list from your bank account and then importing that file to CalendarBudget.

We chose this course because many (most) banks have a security policy which prevents access your suggesting, where you have to give your user id and password to online banking to a 3rd party.  I don’t want to be liable for any security breach and I don’t think you want that kind of exposure to your money.

Having said that, I’m surprised your bank doesn’t allow you to download in QFX/QIF/MS Money format.  Most credit unions and major banks allow this – although sometimes the option is not readily visible. 

CSVs are not a standardized format, so different institutions could export a different CSV format, which would make parsing the file almost impossible.  OFX is a standard format.  I’m guess that if you investigate you’ll find that you can get it from your online banking site.  If Quicken/MS Money is connecting to your bank – they are getting the OFX format – so its definitely there.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Net Worth #3629

We’ve been having internal discussions about a net worth report for almost a year, so its definitely something we’d like to do.
As you’ve mentioned there are a number of challenges.  In addition to what you’ve outlines, here are some of the challenges we’ve identified:

• Because CalendarBudget’s strength is in being able to move into the future (and past) we’d need to be able to calculate the value of assets/investments/liabilities/debts/ etc with time value. Yes, its no problem to get these equations and code them, but the challenge is having you enter that data.  The simplicity of CalendarBudget quickly disappears when you have to enter lots of investments and guess at their growth rate.
• For debt payoff, CalendarBudget would be a great tool to calculate exactly when the debt is paid off.  Since you could mark on specific days to put a prepayment, we’d be able to accurately tell you when the debt will disappear.  I really like this, because generally there is no guessing (except for variable rate loans).  For variable rate loans, we’d have to assume its a fixed rate and allow you to make balance corrections and change the rate.
• Do we allow people to enter all their assets?  What about a car, for example, which depreciates on a weird curve.  People would have to estimate the value of their vehicle and CalendarBudget would then need to figure out some algorithm to depreciate the value over time

In the end, because of these identified challenges, we’ve put the Net Worth report on the back-burner.  We still want to do it, and we think these challenges can be overcome to some degree, while still maintaining the simplicity and ease of use that is CalendarBudget.

We’ve toyed with the idea of having a premium version which has some of these more complicated bells an whistles… Still unsure about that.  We’ll get closer to a decision about that as we approach the end of the beta. 

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