Show overspending in budget
complete
Brandon Trautmann
complete
Kept this simple and simply showed "$X overspent" in place of the remaining balance text for any overspent categories. I'd love to hear feedback on this--I find that small signals like the darker overspending bar aren't picked up/understood by many, so I'm opting for simplicity here in hopes it achieves the goal.
Will release in 1.23.x
Brandon Trautmann
in progress
Planning to do this as I address shortcuts feedback/bugs.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright apologies for such delayed responses, for some reason Canny didn't notify me of yours, and if it did I missed them...
Brandon Trautmann
planned
Will do this as a small thing between shortcuts and BYOC.
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William Anderson Wainwright
Also, while I have your ear, it would also be really helpful if Lumy used the same category order I have set up in YNAB. Not a huge deal, but I do have a specific order with groceries, gas, and everyday at the top, and then I reassign to the categories below. Lumy having a different order throws me off a little.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright: Yeah, I'd love to solve for this but unfortunately the YNAB API doesn't indicate changes to category order. That's tracked by https://lumyforynab.canny.io/features-and-bugs/p/category-group-order-does-not-match-whats-in-ynab which I see you've commented on.
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William Anderson Wainwright
Brandon Trautmann Yeah I saw that after I made this comment! So I think in my comment here I should have said "budget" instead of "category" - the category groups came through in the correct order, and if I change them I can reset the app as a workaround.
But my budgets within each category also have a specific order, and that just doesn't come through at all. Is that another limitation of the API? Like does it just send them over in an unordered list? The only solution then would be a custom order on Lumy's side.
Like if you pulled everything in normally, let users reorder budgets (maybe in the filter view?), and then within that view gave users a button they could tap to refresh their category groups, that would pretty well solve for the API limitations, which I don't think YNAB will ever work with you on.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright So I just wanna align on terminology--I use the term "category groups" to refer to the master groups in the budget (now often referred to as "spending plan" by YNAB folk). I use the term "category" to refer to the individual categories within a category group. Is that what you mean by "budget"? If so, both of these come back from the API in the exact order of your actual budget/spending plan in YNAB, which is good. The problem is that Lumy relies on "delta requests" which is a way to communicate with the API such that only
differences
since the last request are sent back, not the entire list of entities (in this case category groups and categories). While this helps save you bandwidth and helps the server do less work on each request, it also requires changes to be properly communicated. The issue I linked before basically details the fact that if you re-order your categories, YNAB does not
communicate that (what I would love is to have ordering communicated via an index and when you change the order, their new indices get reported). This means Lumy is out-of-date after a single re-order. The most likely solution (and I'll explore this as part of the Shortcuts release) is to stop using delta requests for categories. While this reduces some of the benefits of using them, the downsides are not that big of a deal. Most people don't have THAT many categories, the highest I've seen reported is ~150. This is not a big deal to be requesting every so often. Transactions on the other hand absolutely need to be done via delta requests, as it's not uncommon at all for somebody to have a budget with 20k transactions.
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William Anderson Wainwright
Oh yeah! And to talk a little more about how my wife and I use this, she finds the default YNAB app too confusing, which to be honest it kind of is. I set up a custom view just for her, but there is still just way too much information on the screen, the bars they use are confusing if you add targets, and if you tap on anything you immediately enter edit mode and pull up a complicated calculator, so she's always afraid she'll mess something up. The accounts and transactions screens aren't very good either - it's just a lot to take in visually.
When I found Lumy, I immediately saw how much easier the budget burndown would be for her to read, I can just set up a view of our flexible spending and she can easily see a read-only view of our budget and recent transactions. Plus I know she is seeing the same data I'm seeing, because the refresh is immediate. It was the perfect solution for the exact problem I was trying to solve.
The only issue we have ran into is how to handle overspending. Sometimes on YNAB I actually leave overspending there until we get paid just so we can see hey we went over on this category, we need to slow things down. And that is especially useful if the categories roll up into a simple total, sort of a hybrid of planning and tracking.
Every time I get paid, I fund groceries, gas, and everyday. The everyday fund acts as a sort of slush fund, so if we go out to eat or buy something for the kids, we categorize that and then cover the overspending w/ the everyday category. We also sometimes set aside planned spending, as you can see in our travel example. As we get towards the end of the pay period and all the budgets get low, it's also nice to see a simple total and simple bar so we can quickly know how much we have to work with until we get paid.
Sometimes I categorize stuff first and update the budget later, and sometimes we don't have enough to cover overspent amounts. Both of these scenarios result in overspent amounts, and that has been the only shortcoming w/ switching to Lumy for my wife.
I also have found myself looking using Lumy on mobile. I use YNAB more like a budget editor, and use Lumy to actually think and make decisions.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright: It's awesome to hear that you and your wife have found value in Lumy; I always love hearing use-cases that I didn't expect. Lumy aims to be super simple (even though there is a lot going on under the hood...) so I'm glad that shines through. Thank you again for the suggestions and detailed responses!
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William Anderson Wainwright
I was thinking something like this!
- I made the negative number appear in the same pink color as the parent "Spending" bar (#efa2a2)
- I made all of the assigned amounts and $0 available amounts the same color as an empty bar (#484c53)
- This directs your eyes to the available and overspent amounts, making them easier to see
- I added an additional dark color for the overspent bar.
- I basically kept the bar (assigned - available) / assigned. When that value turns negative, the entire bar starts decreasing.
- So in practice you would start out with a green bar, as it goes down it turns yellow, then red, and then the bar itself starts to go down
- If overspending is ever greater than assigned, then just display the darker overspent bar with nothing filled
Hope that makes sense! Made that picture and typed that out kind of fast.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright: Thank you for the thoughts! I like the idea of representing over-spending, though I might have a way of making it a bit more obvious to the end-user. I am working on something at the moment but this is a small addition that has some good value-add so I'll see if I can get it in the release after next.
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William Anderson Wainwright
Brandon Trautmann Yes exactly! My wife saw money in one category and thought it was safe to spend, not realizing that there was an overspent category that needed to be covered by what she spent.
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright Ah, that’s interesting! I’m curious to hear more about how you and your wife use Lumy to communicate budget specifics, that’s new to me!
How would you expect to see overspending represented in the burndown chart? Asking because I can’t think of a great way. Would you expect just the value to be negative (and maybe red)? What would the bar look like?
Brandon Trautmann
William Anderson Wainwright are you referring to the budget burndown visual?