I think it'd be nice to be able to add your own properties to a category, and choose to display it in the category area or not. For me, I would add a 'goal' property for the upper limit of the category (or a true 'goal'), an 'ideal budget amount' for the amount I want to budget each month, and a 'due date' (day of month, e.g. 3rd) property and show them in the category name area.
When I sit down and budget I would look at my ideal, fill it in, if a category is at the upper limit I don't need to budget anything for it this month, and when I see the due date column I know when I should pay it. I accomplish all this currently with just naming the categories with these values, but it doesn't look good and nothing can be done on the backend with the numbers.
About the backend... I think this functionality goes hand in hand with other 'goal' type feature requests... goals would be some additional category property but which comes with some built in rules engine behind the scenes that is used to calculate stuff, change colors, etc. And maybe this 'rules engine' could be opened up to users too for their custom categories where a basic IFTTT user interface is available with some basic access to financier objects to play with, like IF [category:budgeted this month] < [category]:[ideal] THEN [highlight] [category row: yellow].
Okay, so that last part is stretching the request a bit far :D. In the end, I would be happy with just some additional, even nameless, columns that aligned right ;D
Haha, glad to see all of these ideas. :) I'm always looking for goals ideas. I added this as a comment in Trello for when I come back to it:
https://trello.com/c/rrubl7yx/182-goals
This is certainly a value add. but i am not sure the TS is meaning the same thing. What we do right now is use the Labels to put in this information. Here is my implementation:
(http://i.imgur.com/TMwRfmU.png)
Yeah, that is what I currently do. For many reasons I don't like it, but it does get the job done.
Categories are the most important part in my opinion. They are how you organize your budget, categorize expenses, prioritize your spending, and break-down the numbers later. The Months always just have a budgeted, outflow, and balance... giving up some of the Month screen real-estate for more data about a category seems like a good idea to me. Even giving up the 3rd month for more space would be fine, I usually just need this month and last month.
Thanks for taking this into consideration Alex!
Nice idea - which I have stolen for myself!
Thank you
Hmm. I'll definitely have to think about have to fit this into the screen real estate.
One possibility is making future fields red/yellow/etc if they meet/do not meet certain specifications you've set. Maybe even based off of custom formulas that you create? That would be cool...