PTA is more or less a collection of formats. Beancount, for example, uses a colon-separated account name per transaction line, such as "Income:Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance" (excluding the quotes). There are a couple of fixed main accounts (such as "Income"), and the user can arbitrarily define subaccounts (in this example "Work:PrimaryJob:HolidayAllowance").
Although I see your point in wanting clarity, if the format supports arbitrary subaccounts, you can use the tool itself to limiting the number of subaccounts to show (e.g. with 1 you would only see the accumulated amount in all accounts in the "Income:Work" hierarchy). This still fits your use case for clarity, but allows other users to expand the budgeting tool to their needs.
I'll push a new release with the license — always forget this!
Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached timestamp.
And yes, will definitely push Win/Linux releases soon!
Great to hear! Maybe, as someone pointed out in another comment, it might make sense to show how you use your tool yourself in a dedicated blog entry, and link that in the readme. People usually learn very well from examples. :)
The processor considers monthly income when calculating your projections. It'll sum all credit and debit operations (from all flows) and calculate from there.
> In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.
Just wanted to give 2 cents on the rationale behind this:
Most people don't budget at all.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and confusing to manage — not everyone is fluent in spreadsheet formulas, as basic as they may be, to the point of getting the setup right, and most template spreadsheets available pack a lot of unnecessary things and customizing them becomes a project of its own. There's also the feeling of despair realizing you're not even close to even having that much data or assets to put in. This is not only my opinion — this is what I've gathered asking friends and family on the topic.
So this is a way to keep things simple. Extremely simple. No integration to banks, no mental overhead, just a smart replacement for a piece of paper where you write down your income and your expenses. There is a lot of people that still use a physical notebook to keep track of their finances, in this day and age, out of sheer choice — it's a way to maintain focus on the big picture, and not miss any detail.
It's a way to express your finances in a portable, human-readable format that is essentially computable plain text. You can express your finances at a 10,000-feet level, know what your savings will look like, for motivation, and know where your money is going. This is it. Surely it will be too simple for many, but perhaps just about right for some.
You're also not vendor locked, your data is plain text and you can use the CLI (free and open source) to process it. I myself use the CLI and manage my sheets from Sublime Text. Yep :)
the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income.
you look at whether your bank account is growing or not.
then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.
only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.
you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.
if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.
i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses.
your app seems useful only after i have done that.
the workflow i am looking for is:
i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.
I'm not sure that level of detail (specifying receipts to the article level) helps you get a grasp of your overall spending, nor do I expect it giving the "right advice". Suppose you buy a lot of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, would you want that tool to suggest you reduce that spending?
the point is to group articles by category. a single visit to a supermarket may contain important and vanity items mixed together. i want to break that out and then categorize accordingly. i do want to know how much i am spending on candy or sugar drinks, or, if you are so inclined, cigarettes or alcohol. toys, gifts, school supplies are all different categories that are worth tracking. if you go shopping at places like target or walmart you'll get all of that mixed up on a single receipt.
fruits and vegetables don't need their own category. they could be grouped into food but candy bars or soda are not food.
i don't want the tool to suggest anything, but i want the numbers so i can draw my own conclusions.
entering data by article is easier than categorizing on the spot. i could just scan the receipt and let the tool work out the categories (once i assigned a category to an item, the tool can do it for any repeat appearance)
I suppose a tool like Beancount (or (h)ledger, but I only have experience with beancount) and bean-web would fulfill your needs. The latter offers HTML reports per arbitrary subaccount, based on the data entered in the beancount file (which is plain text).
Thank you so much for the feedback — this is a very early iteration.
I've been using it for several years and wanted to get it into an app. I've been getting a lot of suggestions and requests from early adopters. I will definitely take yours into consideration. There's a lot of room for improvements.
Re: GUI limitation, there's a CLI which is open source and free:
Only issue I have is with the indentation-based subitems.
I'd rather keep it restricted to top-level groups for clarity.