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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

This is nice, but for budgets to be effective, they need to be across multiple time periods.

Budgeting is like an optimization/monitoring problem with 2 objectives:

1. monthly cash flow > 0 (don't ever let your cash situation go negative e.g. credit-card debt)

2. maximize(Year End final balance)

I have a Google Sheets doc that I've used for years where I have inflows and outflows by month, and a year-end balance that is automatically calculated. This lets me see what my projected cash status will be at the end of the year.

At every month, the cash flow (in - out) is calculated -- this prevents me from going underwater at any given period.

Having a dynamically updating spreadsheet helps you to monitor those two objective functions and make course-corrections.

It's simple, it's cloud-based and it's available on all devices.

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To do anything more than simple additions and substractions, I found I needed the following information:

* date,

* amount (+/-),

* beneficiary,

* account (N° or establishment),

* a short memo (can help with cross-category expenses, such as moving: requires gas, train tickets, movers, new furniture, selling old furniture),

* and a (sub)category (gas/car, train/trips, "Livret A"/saving, etc.).

Yeah, that's my idea with this issue:

https://github.com/galvez/plainbudget/issues/4

I want to be able to have multiple "sheets" horizontally, one for each month, and then make it possible to calculate a final balance (and perhaps even a graph in the background).

Nevertheless, plainbudget as a CLI tool has worked just as well for me for many years. It does take a bit of manual text wrangling in its current form, but I hope it'll grow now that it's open sourced :)

>, plainbudget as a CLI tool has worked just as well for me for many years. It does take a bit of manual text wrangling in its current form

I looked over your site's examples and the conceptual primitives you have designed ("value groups", "cashflows", "expenses") do not seem to be powerful enough to manage "budgeting". Yes, you're deliberately trying to make it "simple" but text entries without date timestamps metadata for each transaction and without accounts/categories/buckets/tags will impede disciplined budgeting. Your (lack of) metadata primitives is too simple.

Based on your example, each "value group" doesn't seem much more than an isolated group of arithmetic operations which is similar to punching in some calculations on a desktop calculator[1]. E.g. one enters a few calculations which shows up on a paper tape, presses "C" to clear and punches another group of calculations, and presses "C" to clear, etc. Your text system has obvious advantage of "text labels" over the desktop calculator but it doesn't have enough metadata primitives (e.g. timestamps & tags) to produce budget forecasts, goal planning, savings schedules (e.g. college fund, vacation fund, retirement, contingency reserves for house repairs and car repairs, etc).

https://www.google.com/search?q=adding+machine&source=lnms&t...

> Your text system has obvious advantage of "text labels" over the desktop calculator but it doesn't have enough metadata primitives (e.g. timestamps & tags) to produce budget forecasts, goal planning, savings schedule (e.g. college fund, vacation fund, retirement, contingency reserves for house repairs and car repairs, etc).

Yes, it has none of these features. Intentionally. Perhaps due to sheer stubbornness, I have used a collection of manually edited text files for most of these. It just came to a point where having a script to run calculations automatically became essential.

And lately, I've found myself using the script for quick calculations. I wrote the web version as a way to avoid having to create a new text file just for that. But there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.

I actually want to explore creating a plugin API.

>Yes, it has none of these features. Intentionally.

Yes, I can see you designed the omission deliberately but what I don't understand is how to do effective budgeting without a timeline calculation. You need date&time metadata to facilitate planning and planning is budgeting. Budgets based only on arithmetic against snapshots of balances without incorporating a time horizon doesn't seem like "budgeting".

>, I have used a collection of manually edited text files

It looks like making text entries "simple" means shifting the "complexity" to multiple sheets (or multiple text files). The hidden implicit metadata is the filename conventions and organization of text files.

>But there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I actually want to explore creating a plugin API.

To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file.

> To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file.

Yeah, I myself use a few conventions for dates. I'll probably document and automate those soon.

Could you possibly share it (with demo numbers)? Interested in setting it up for myself.

Sure. Here's a screenshot of a sample I mocked up (with fake numbers and fake categories) https://imgur.com/a/tJUcJE3

I keep my eyes primarily on the monthly Running Balance line, and specifically, the Year End Target (the rightmost item on that line). Those are the KPIs (key performance indicators) that I monitor.

The calculations are fairly simple. The running balance Total Income - Total Expenses + PrevRunningBal. (PrevRunningBal is 0 and excluded from the formula in the first month).

Once-off Expenses is a category that's expanded out in the bottom so I have a better sense of where I spend chunks of unbudgeted money. It's summed up in the Expense item "Once off Expenses".

I also have a monthly buffer as a safety factor, in case I overspend.

As you can see I don't track expenses at the receipt level (too tedious), just on the gross level (and only if it's above a certain amount -- I don't sweat a $2 pack of gum).

For me this is a good balance between a too-loosy-goosey budget that is useless and a too-detailed-budget that is tedious to keep up.

This is enough to keep me on track for the entire year, and I usually end up with quite a bit of spare change at year end.

I like the idea of a running balance. That's what I want to accomplish by enabling multible tabs/sheets. Lots of good ideas, thanks.

One question - what do you do with the End-of-Month Reconciliation? Is that something you fill in every month?

Yes. If my running balance doesn’t match actual cash in my bank account, I just enter a correction and an in-line comment describing the cause of the discrepancy. However often I find I’m usually in the right ball park (my recurring expense patterns are very regular) so I rarely use that field.

Also I’m rarely off budget by a lot, partly because of the visibility this tool provides. My feedback loops are tighter due to monitoring.

You can also do what-if scenarios pretty easily, e.g. can I afford a vacation in Spain in a particular month without dipping under, how much of a raise do I need to ask for to hit a target, etc. You can play around with timing and amount.

A spreadsheet provides you with all the metaphors you need to do planning and budgeting efficiently. It’s a solved problem. It’s really hard to beat.

Oh this is really nice! Thanks - gives me something to construct tonight :)

Yes I second wanting to see what you've set up. I've used a Google Sheet for the past few years to track my monthly budget but I overwrite most values each start of month so I don't have any historical tracking, which would be really useful.

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