Broken monthly balance

[uberdrops]

Hi,

my monthly budget ballance seems to be broken, the values do not add up. I traced the calculation to [1] but I haven't found the time to learn how to debug this locally in my browser. Any ideas what might cause this?

OS: Win 7
Browser: Firefox 59.0.1
Financier: Latest. I guess. Info is broken. 

[1] https://gitlab.com/financier/financier/blob/master/src/scripts/controllers/masterCategoryCtrl.js

[asromzek]

Out of curiosity, does refreshing the page fix the values? Something doing a fresh load of the app will recalculate all of the numbers correctly.

Otherwise... @Alex!!!

[Alex]

Yeah, try a refresh. If that doesn't work, email hello@financier.io with an exported backup of your budget and I will take a look.

Thanks!

[Alex]

Also, has it always been wrong? Is this an old budget, or new? Was it imported from YNAB4?

[uberdrops]

Refresh does not change anything. Its also broken on iOS.

The budget starts in Nov 16 I think. It is not imported from YNAB.

You should get an eMail shortly.

[Billy_McSkintos]

I believe I have seen things like this before in my mine too but only by a few bucks and have never pinpointed it exactly. I have also seen instances that are resolved by a logout and clear cache.

[Alex]

@Billy_McSkintos I believe I found the problem, there was no category/transfer defined for a number of transactions. I followed up in an email. I'll make sure to keep y'all updated if that's not the problem.

I definitely need to implement some warning system if transactions are not entered correctly. Remember all: Check that the account and category/transfer is defined for all transactions (including split transactions - expand and check!)

[uberdrops]

You were right, I was able to reproduce the problem in a new test budget, which I attached.

I have a money market account, which at least gives 1% interest right now, for short term savings as an on-budget acconut.
Once my income arrives I transfer the sum of the fractual yearly payments for insurances and for saving targets to the money market acccount. There I create a new transaction with the incoming amount as a "No category" and then then add the the different budget positions as outgoing.
That way I do not need to manually transfer 15 different amounts from my checking account to my money market account.

I tried having the money market account as off-budget. Once I transfer money off budget I can assign it to a category. But in case of savings, for example vacation I would like to transfer my saved 500€ back to my checking account and have it as a positive value in the vacation category, so that my vacation expenses can be budgeted against it.

Any ideas how to improve my process?

Btw: I can live quite alright with the broken monthly balance as my other processes work fine.

[uberdrops]

Ok. And for a moment there I thought I am stupid.

Of cource you can use an off-budget account. Transfer money and budget it against a rainy-day funds savings budget line. And 2 months later you transfer the money back, budget it positively against car maintenance costs et voila: you correctly used pre-budgeted and saved money to fix your car.

BUT: A transfer to an off-ballance account cannot be a split transaction. Meaning I have to either transfer each of the 20 or so saving positions individually from my bank account to to the money market account (which sucks) or keep the money market account on budget. Which annoys me with the broken monthly ballance. 

[Alex]

Hi @uberdrops --

Sorry for the slow response. I looked at this, meant to look at in depth later and then it fell off my radar.

In regards to transfers to off budget accounts as splits. I believe they can be. For example:

Create new transaction, no payee, category = split
For split line item one, make transfer to off budget account. Set the category to whatever you want. Note that it is important the payee transfer target account MUST be an off budget account or the category will be ignored (transfers from on budget to on budget accounts inherently don't have categories).
Repeat for line item two with different category assigned

Make sure the total adds up, for example outflow in split line items 1 and 2 must add up to the total.

Submit the transaction. The transfers to off budget accounts should work.

I tested this. Let me know if this is not what you are intending to do.

Thanks!

[asromzek]

Creating a split that contains a transfer to another account does not work well in the mobile app. There's definitely a known issue, and I have no found a solution (yet). Even though the code is nearly identical to the main app, it doesn't work the same. So, if you are entering splits that contain transfers, make sure to use the main app.

I nearly forgot about this issue...

[uberdrops]

Well look at this. Thanks Alex. This way it works. Are transfers and transactions internally different data structures?

Only really minor downside: The receiving account of a split transaction now has transactions, that doe nt match the physical ones in the account. But you have to die one death. This is the smallest one.