wish: table view for budget setup

[Laurent Groleau]

I guess that this wish slightly differs from #887510.
I am for the moment limited to HomeBank 4.5.5 on Ubuntu 14.04, hope my wish is not outdated.

What I miss most from Quicken98 is the "table view" for budget setup.
It looks like:
  -horizontal axis: 12 monthes from January to December
  -vertical axis: categories (Credit first) expandable, to detail sub-categories
  -data cells are amounts
    >sub-category, budget amount by default positive for Credit/negative for Debit
    >category: sum of sub-categories amount, and there is a mandatory sub-category labelled "category - others"
  -Moreover:
    >sum of row is displayed at the end of the row
    >sums of column are displayed at the bottom of the column: credit, debit, balance

This is a powerful tool to maintain an equilibrated budget.

I took note of the answer given to #590387 : import/export budget as CSV file. It is a good workaround. This would deserve an entry in "tips&tricks" chapter of documentation.

Thanks for your great work !

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Hello,

I took last week some time to hack homebank to create such a view.

It looks good for me (see screenshot attached), but I'm not a lot familiar with C and Gtk+, so reviews are welcome !

For the moment, I've decided to add this view as a new report named "Budget balance".
Maybe in the future, we'll want to use this view to manage the bugdet too.

That could be feasible (the Gtk tool kit is cleary able, we just have to add more code to manage edition), but the current UI to manage budget seems to be simpler.

I didn't implemented "sums sub-category in parent category", because the user can set budget on parent categories too.

Note that I had to create a new preference in HomeBank to keep size and position of this new report.

Last but not least, the code is available here: https://code.launchpad.net/~adorsaz/homebank/homebank

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

I think the wish was for input, and not for report.

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Ok, while I was making this proof of concept, I've thought about such a screen with editing capability.

I've not currently implemented editing functions, but that's clearly feasible with the Gtk tooling, I just need to take a little more time to do the bridge between Category class and the GtkTreeView/Model.

Does a budget editor using this table view as a base has some interest for you ?

To do that, I just need to add two columns one to decide if the amount budgeted is fixed for all month and one to set input in the fixed mode.

Although the GtkTreeView will be really big horizontally, because of the 16 columns and vertically too, because I'll have to show all categories and not just the ones with a budget setted.

Let me know if you want I continue to work on this, thanks !

[Laurent Groleau (laurentofmars)]

It sounds like this would perfectly match my wish :)

Laurent Groleau

Le 16/09/2018 à 18:26, Adrien Dorsaz a écrit :
> Ok, while I was making this proof of concept, I've thought about such a
> screen with editing capability.
>
> I've not currently implemented editing functions, but that's clearly
> feasible with the Gtk tooling, I just need to take a little more time to
> do the bridge between Category class and the GtkTreeView/Model.
>
> Does a budget editor using this table view as a base has some interest
> for you ?
>
> To do that, I just need to add two columns one to decide if the amount
> budgeted is fixed for all month and one to set input in the fixed mode.
>
> Although the GtkTreeView will be really big horizontally, because of the
> 16 columns and vertically too, because I'll have to show all categories
> and not just the ones with a budget setted.
>
> Let me know if you want I continue to work on this, thanks !
>

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Hello,

Last weekend I took some time to do a few work on this feature.

Currently, I'm working on my own branch on my Gitlab here:
https://projects.adorsaz.ch/adrien/homebank/tree/advanced-budget-editor

(note, that branch will be heavy rebased and updated as it's only a current work in progress)

Instead of having an enormous array with every categories, I've decided to split the view in 3 parts:

- "Balance": contains categories (income and expense) that have a budget. This view will be read only to reduce the number of columns (it doesn't have columns "Same ?" and "Monthly") and shows only categories which are forced to show or which have a budget set.
- "Income": contains income categories (even the one which don't currently has a budget) and is editable
- "Expense": same idea, with expense categories

Currently, all this work is still under the "report" menu, because I need your opinion about how to name this new budget manager and if it should replace the current budget manager.

Personally, I think we should keep both budget manager and we could call this one "advanced budget manager". Although, I'm aware that it will double work of support and bug surface.

On next days, I'll implement the edition of cells to allow user to set values.

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Since I've written my comment above, I've thought it will be better to have the 3 views editable (and so every one with all columns).

The advantage of the balance view is to have directly the balance between incomes and expenses without having too many useless categories.

The advantage of the two other is to show every categories, even the one which are not currently used.
Maybe, I should add for these two views a new column to show/edit the state of the setting "Force display (in balance)".

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Hello,

I had time to finish implementation of this new feature.

Currently, I've added a new dialog "Advanced Budget Manager" below the "Manage" menu.

The dialog contains just the 3 modes proposed above and every mode is editable.

I'll propose to merge my bazaar branch to resolve this bug.

If bazaar branches are too hard to use (that was the case for me :/), you can retrieve patch list here:
https://projects.adorsaz.ch/adrien/homebank/merge_requests/1.patch

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Hello,

I've just seen the patch isn't complete: I forgot to increase a "using" counter for each categories.
I'll check later how I should do this.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

Hi Adrien,

I will review all of this for next 5.3 for sure.

Max.

[Adrien Dorsaz (adorsaz)]

Ok, I've just added a new merge proposal for this bug which adds category management feature inside the same screen.

I'll add some screenshots to this bug report so you can see the progress.

[Leonardo Regnier de Lima Pereira (volken-x)]

First of all, this app is just a masterpiece, I spent several years trying others, but none of them had so many features or was easy to use.

I really would like the Budget reports to be similar to the Statistics reports. Sometimes for financial planning, knowing monthly and not only yearly if ends will meet is very important. Getting the percentage of the budget for each category, will also be very informative. I'm not vastly experienced in coding, but I guess using the Statistics reports as the base will be a good start, to solve all of these suggestions.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

what you request is something else than this feature, which was released already
please open a new wish bug