The weekly budgeting was a added a few months back. We've now also added the ability for you to customize the start and end date of the budget you'd like to view. Please see BudgetTracker Updates for more information.
11/24/2008 09:25:21
Gary
User
Re:Budget timing
I think that you could calculate the weekly categories (whether it be income or expense, weekly, bi-weekly, every 3rd week, or whatever) by using the actual number of the week of the year and leave the month (for the most part) out of it. I think that most programming languages have something that will give you the number of the week (not sure though). You could use this to calculate all of the weeklies and use what you have now for the monthlies. You could have a check box that gives you the choice something like - Do you want this category (or whatever) to be recorded monthly (check box) or weekly (check box). When the check box is clicked you can load a drop down that populates with - monthly, bi-monthly, every other month, every third month, or whatever - or if weekly was the choice - weekly, bi-weekly, every third week, etc. or better yet you could just have a drop down with all of the choices together. Anyway, not trying to tell you how to do it or anything. It was just a thought. When it comes to budgeting things by the week it really doesn't matter what month it is. I don't know about anyone else but what month it is doesn't have any bearing on when I buy my groceries, toiletries, vitamins, clothes, etc. It really only boils down to what I have budgeted for that week. I never take into account what month it is on these types of things. Unless you get paid by the month, this is probably the case for a lot of your categories. So if you wanted to split them up by week number I don't think it would have any bearing on the rest of our budget (though it may play heck with how some things are calculated in Budget Tracker, haven't really thought that through yet.) I am sure that it could be worked around though. It seems to me that it should be a totally autonomous function anyway. As far as those categories go. You can calculate totals by taking into account whether or not the category is being tracked monthly or weekly (whether or not it is bi-weekly, etc.) and just multiply (accordingly, bi-weekly, etc.) by how many weeks happen to be in that month. Sorry for the techno babble, I am sure that you guys are very capable so don't take my thoughts the wrong way please. Just wanted to let my thoughts be known. They may or may not be of any use to you and I am perfectly fine either way. I hope that you guys can implement this feature in some way, I look forward to it.
Thanks again for an awesome program!
Gary
09/10/2008 13:50:14
support
Administrator
Re:Budget timing
Thanks for the detailed feedback. This is a great idea and would really help in more accurately keeping track of your Budget. We can do bi-monthly by seperating it before or after the 15th of each month. The weekly though we'll have to give some thought since some months could potentially have 5 weeks. There are a few ways we could go about weekly (divide the number of days in the month by 4, or apply weeks as the first 7 days of the month and so on then make the 4th week carry over to the end of the month, etc.) Of course anyones feedback on this would be helpful in building this out.
09/09/2008 23:09:39
Gary
User
Budget timing
This may be too much to ask but I have an idea about budgeting that may or may not be a good idea.
I was wondering if it would be possible/practical to be able to choose on how you want each budgeted category/subcategory to be split up.
Currently you (and everyone else I know of) splits a budget up by month. I was thinking that it would be great if you could choose how each of your sub categories are split up. For instance, currently I budget $400 per month to my groceries subcategory. While I am going through the month it keeps track of the moneys I spend and categorize to it. Early on in the month it will show that I spent say $87 on groceries and that I still have $313 available to spend in that category. The truth of the matter may be that I haven't received or saved up a full months worth of available spendable income to allocate to this category but it still says I have $313 lft to spend when I actually only have $13 left to spend for that week. While I keep track of this in my head and know that I can only spend about $100 per week, this may not be the case for some of my other categories like Electricity. I know that this bill is a once per month bill and that I need to allocate that money as soon as I get it and not touch it until the bill comes due so I can watch it on a monthly basis and it wouldn't be a problem. Then I may have another expense that happens on a bi-weekly basis and needs to be watched on a bi-weekly basis.
I am not sure if I am getting my point across like I want so forgive me if I carry on far after you get what I am saying.
The end product would look something like this. The My Bidget page would be just the same accept for the categories that you chose to split into weekly would have four graphics showing each week and what was available/spent for those weeks as the month proceeds. Likewise for the bi-weekly choices only there would be two graphics. You could have the graphic display the amount inside each corresponding area. Spent $87/remaining available $13. Of course you wouldn't need the text, just the numbers and different colors for each of the parts of the graph, jusst like it is now jonly include the amount remaining and split it up into what ever division you choose. This way you can more precisely manage your finances at a glance. No more calculating in your head for each of the categories. You could leave the budgeted amount just like it is. The only change that you would need to do would be to allow us to choose per sub-category whether we wanted it to be split up by week, bi-weekly or monthly. Then split the graph accordingly when it is displayed in the My Budget page. I know that this would require a bit more programming than just splitting the graph because you have to be able to apply the transactions depending on which week and all but it seems like a good idea to me. I don't feel that this is a necessity but it would be a nice addition.
Thanks for letting us make suggestions and keep up the awesomely good work!
