[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Mark Items as Completed or Planned… and interface for those #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).

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Automatic Credit Card bill estimation #3940

As I see this (I should read this topic for another 3-4 times to fully understand the need of wtanksleyjr) – you should make some RESERVATION of your funds. I would open another “virtual” account (named RESERVATION, for example) and transfer funds onto it! Also, I would make another transfer (back) on the exact date of credit pay-off. You could look at it as some savings account.

I tried this — it doesn’t work, because it throws off all of the CalendarBudget bank reconciliation.

For a future bill with a known date there’s another option — simply manually update the future bill. As long as you remember to scroll a couple months ahead to look for negative cash balances you’ll be OK. It’s a pity that’s a lot of manual work if you use a credit card a lot, but it’s better than nothing.

And odds are that your credit bill will be pretty much the same every month, so perhaps you can get away with only entering a guess, and then updating the guess when the bill arrives.

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Missing features: split transactions & sub-categories? #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.

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Missing features: split transactions & sub-categories? #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.

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Automatic Credit Card bill estimation #3938

I can see a problem with that… I don’t need to keep that amount of money in my account forever; I only need to make sure it’s there in time for the bill — just like every other planned expense. It seems like a natural use for a planned expense.

However, while reading some of the old forum messages, I found one old idea that might be better than mine — the commentor called it a “snowball” program, but let’s just call it a “debt planner”. It’d be a menu selection that would ask you some questions, then generate calendar entries for the forseeable future. In addition to asking you for any overdue balances on the accounts CalendarBudget knows about, it would also ask for other debts, their amounts, their due dates, whether there’s special zero-interest treatement for bills paid on time… It would also ask you for your priorities (pay down debt ASAP, maintain position, clear only the high-interest debts, and so on) and strategy (optimal, Ramsey Snowball, etc).  Then it would generate transfers that are calculated based on priorities.

If the script is run a second time, it would read in the existing transfers and pre-fill the plan with the data implied by them (yes, the entries would have to include some kind of marker so that script would know how to look for them).

That’s kind of blue sky, but it seems useful.

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Mark Items as Completed or Planned… and interface for those #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

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Missing features: split transactions & sub-categories? #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

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Automatic Credit Card bill estimation #3936

Fair enough… And I’ll add in support of deferring this idea that there are a billion and one things your programmer(s) have to do.  :D

ALSO: it’s a quickly thought out idea that would add a _very_ special case just for fully-paid-off credit cards. Probably something even better could be done, if I bothered to think it through.

Frankly, though, I don’t think timing is a real problem. The BIG purpose of this idea isn’t to produce a perfect day-by-day prediction, but rather to allow me to make sure the right amount of money is in the right place — if the actuall bill needs to be paid a few days later than planned nothing is going to explode. The big deal is (for example) that I know that $2000 balance sitting in the account two months from now is NOT available for discretionary spending, because it’s going to be spent to pay the unusually high credit card bill caused by several quarterly bills coming in at the same time on the previous month.

But… like I said… there’s probably a better way.

-Wm

[wtanksleyjr]

in reply to: Mark Items as Completed or Planned… and interface for those #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?

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