First of all, great job! this software has a lot of promise. There are some major improvements still needed before I'm ready to use it on a daily basis or at least begin running it in parallel with YNAB4.
Major improvements needed before switching from YNAB4:
- Ability to import YNAB4 budget: accounts, categories, budget amounts, and transactions. (done! - converter tool (https://discuss.financier.io/index.php?topic=134.msg897#msg897))
- Mobile app compatible with iPhone w/ GPS-enabled payees.
- Scheduled transactions.
- Ability to import OFX transactions.
- Budget templates / quick-budget options. I like to store my ideal budget and with one click budget it at the start of the month. With YNAB4, that means I store it in the next month’s budgeted cells, and quick-budget it forward to the following month. (quick budget options are added!)
- Split category transactions. (done!)
Improvements that would help complete my transition:
- Payee settings.
- Ability to hide reconciled transactions.
- Search capabilities.
- Ability to collapse/open the Available to budget header. It takes up way too much screen real estate currently. I like to have it collapsed usually anyways. This is unbelievably annoying when I try to work in the budget screen. (done!)
- Date formats are too picky. If I type “8/31â€, it should default to 8/31/2016. Similarly, typing 8/31/2016 is not recognized either, as it has to be MM/DD/YY format. You are unable to save a transaction if the date is in the wrong format, without an alert as to why.
- Income for months beyond next month.
- Ability to edit the flag descriptions and create your own flags (possibly with emoticons?)
- Ability to mass move transactions between accounts.
- Goals
Minor improvements needed:
- When an OFX file is opened on my computer, I would like it to be imported into Financier by default. I use Pocket Sense to download my transactions daily, and the Pocket Sense download automatically opens YNAB4 and imports my transactions.
- When sorting by the cleared column, it should sort reconciled transactions, then cleared transactions, then uncleared transactions. (fixed)
- Running balance column (with ability to hide the column on a per account basis)
- Check number column (with the ability to hide the column on a per account basis)
- Ability to hide categories (and unhide them).
- Tabbing over when a category or payee is selected in the account register does not select the highlighted category or payee as expected.
- Typing “.†in the date field should default to today’s date.
- Selecting a transaction and pressing delete, should delete a transaction.
- Edit menu should pop up when you right-click on transactions or categories in the budget.
- You can create two master categories with the same name. (and two categories within the same master with the same name)
- New categories are added at the bottom of a master category, whereas new master categories are added at the top. I would expect this to be consistent. This is purely polish though.
- Red arrow popups on the furthest right side of the screen don’t always show up on the screen.
- Make the year a drop-down in the header on the budget page.
- Often times, I start typing a number in my budget file and have to tab back to the bank’s website. When I tab back, financier automatically assumes that what I was typing was the whole number and adds “.00â€. I don’t want it to do that, I want the number to be still typing as it was. Often times I type the numbers before the decimal, and then tab back and type the numbers after the decimal. (done!)
- I would like to see offline use have a different color scheme then the online synced budget.
Improvements compared to YNAB4:
- I love that you can tab between the budgeted cells for different months. That always annoyed me I couldn’t use my keyboard to move from the budgeted cells from one month to the next month.
- Online access is great.
- The fact you will be actively developing this software is great.
Improvements compared to nYNAB:
- Red arrows are great.
- Future-dated transactions are great.
- Pricing structure is great.
- Walled months are great.
- Income for next month is great.
Importing .ofx transactions, scheduled transactions, and a mobile app are what will be needed for me to completely ditch YNAB4. I've started to run in parallel though.
A mobile app would be nice, but even if that is not possible currently than at least a responsive mobile site. Just something to help input payments on the fly would be useful.
I know those are plans on Trello, so hopefully we will see something from it in the future!
QuoteDate formats are too picky. If I type “8/31â€, it should default to 8/31/2016. Similarly, typing 8/31/2016 is not recognized either, as it has to be MM/DD/YY format. You are unable to save a transaction if the date is in the wrong format, without an alert as to why.
Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference. If we're seconding or putting in "me too"s, this is a small feature that would really help my usage, since it would decrease the amount of time it takes to enter transactions. This is a feature that I really got used to while using YNAB4.
Related:
Is there a way to change the format of the date? For some reason, in my browser, it's defaulting to DD/MM/YYYY but I would like to set it to MM/DD/YYYY or MM/DD/YY. There doesn't seem to be any place to modify format settings yet. This is only a small issue, though.
Quote from: huntingrarebits on October 25, 2016, 09:06:09 AM
Related:
Is there a way to change the format of the date? For some reason, in my browser, it's defaulting to DD/MM/YYYY but I would like to set it to MM/DD/YYYY or MM/DD/YY. There doesn't seem to be any place to modify format settings yet. This is only a small issue, though.
This changes depending on your browser/OS locale. There will not be an option to configure it otherwise.
You can also use the up/down arrows to change date. That's what I do.
I converted my YNAB4 budget today. It worked seamlessly. Good work
@Alex - all 9 years of data migrated without any issues!
One of the four major hurdles I needed to get over... Mobile app, scheduled transactions, and then import .ofx files and I'm completely converted!
@Joel How's the performance after migrating all of your data? With data back to 2011, nYNAB takes a long, long time to load each and every time I open it.
Quote from: asromzek on November 23, 2016, 10:22:24 AM
@Joel How's the performance after migrating all of your data? With data back to 2011, nYNAB takes a long, long time to load each and every time I open it.
In all honesty, without scheduled transactions and the ability to import, I haven't yet started really using the software. I've been too busy to try to run this system in parallel with YNAB4.
I'm impressed that you have 9 years in one budget. I found it became a bit bloat-like on YNAB for me. Reports would be nice but every financial year I made a fresh start and made some adjustments to accounts and how I set out categories (read: I'm lazy and my payee list blows out and I couldn't be bothered removing them manually)
Quote from: athikalaka on November 25, 2016, 11:13:23 PM
I'm impressed that you have 9 years in one budget. I found it became a bit bloat-like on YNAB for me. Reports would be nice but every financial year I made a fresh start and made some adjustments to accounts and how I set out categories (read: I'm lazy and my payee list blows out and I couldn't be bothered removing them manually)
Whenever I felt like the file was getting slow, I just compacted the budget and never had any issues.
Quote from: athikalaka on November 25, 2016, 11:13:23 PM
I'm impressed that you have 9 years in one budget. I found it became a bit bloat-like on YNAB for me. Reports would be nice but every financial year I made a fresh start and made some adjustments to accounts and how I set out categories (read: I'm lazy and my payee list blows out and I couldn't be bothered removing them manually)
I have 6.5 years of budget information in YNAB, and I'm going to hold on to that history as long as I can, regardless of the software we're using. Whenever I'm discouraged by my finances, I look back to where we started to see how far we've come to get a boost: overloaded by debt in July, 2011 to debt free as of April, 2016. It's been a roller-coaster, but I love my trend line.
Jelly. I wish I kept my really old budgets but I think I purged some files along the way, life chapters!
I had the tendency to look forward and not look back at the struggles of the past. My attitude was to start with my buffer/savings and keep working to increase it.
That's great to show that you've been able to bring your Net Worth out of the red! A good case study to show why budgeting helps.
When I started YNAB I didn't have a debt issue but I used it to assist my money tracking so my graph won't be as interesting as yours, nonetheless it would've been nice to have a long term tracking.
Ah well, can't cry over spilt milk, problem of spring cleaning my files all the time! :-\
Quote from: asromzek on November 26, 2016, 08:08:15 PM
I have 6.5 years of budget information in YNAB, and I'm going to hold on to that history as long as I can, regardless of the software we're using. Whenever I'm discouraged by my finances, I look back to where we started to see how far we've come to get a boost: overloaded by debt in July, 2011 to debt free as of April, 2016. It's been a roller-coaster, but I love my trend line.
I can't wait till my chart looks like that. :)
Quote from: athikalaka on November 26, 2016, 08:31:03 PM
Jelly. I wish I kept my really old budgets but I think I purged some files along the way, life chapters!
I had the tendency to look forward and not look back at the struggles of the past. My attitude was to start with my buffer/savings and keep working to increase it.
That's great to show that you've been able to bring your Net Worth out of the red! A good case study to show why budgeting helps.
When I started YNAB I didn't have a debt issue but I used it to assist my money tracking so my graph won't be as interesting as yours, nonetheless it would've been nice to have a long term tracking.
Ah well, can't cry over spilt milk, problem of spring cleaning my files all the time! :-\
Data collection and retention is basically what I do for a living: writing software that collects and stores production process information that can be used for automotive recalls. I have a difficult time deleting files. ;)