Scheduled transactions (records)

[withinboredom]

I noticed that if I schedule a transaction in the future, it updates my balance today. Is that by design or a bug? I actually like it for if I am trying to plan things out, but it makes it harder to reconcile later (does my actual account balance match what is on the screen).

[EnhancedJax]

Bagels is designed for daily input - so it assumes you won't input something for the future - only when actually it is incurred. This design is also why you can't press right on today to go to tomorrow when selecting date in home. But automating recurring transactions is on the todo list!

[withinboredom]

Got it and it makes sense! What I mean by planning is that I know a payment is coming out this Friday for 900ish, so I’ll add it in the future. My account balance goes down into the negatives (say, -200), so I know I need to make sure I put at least that amount in my account so it won't actually go negative on Friday.

This is a fantastic feature to have, imho. But like I said, it makes reconciliation harder. It would be nice to see if you used both lines of the accounts for two balances. Line one could show the current balance up to and including today, while line two could show the balance for the entire ledger, like it does now.

For what its worth, your software has actually caused me to discover a bug in my banking app; so keep up the good work!

[EnhancedJax]

That's a great idea! I think I'll implement this as a 'scheduled transaction' feature, where records added in future timestamps must be marked 'paid' for it to affect the balance, but it can also show the affected balance when needed! Coming in 0.3.x

[mia-0]

I think this is a really good aproach: No additional dialogs or inputs except for the confirmation. I’d like to think of these as “expected” or “soft” rather than “scheduled” transactions: You input these to get an idea of what your financial situation might look like 2 or 3 weeks from now. The obligatory nature of a schedule doesn’t have to apply here.

Which gives me another idea: If Bagels can observe patterns of transactions in a given category, it could display suggestions that you simply confirm/edit+confirm or ignore. I think this makes sense because there isn’t always enough certainty to turn something into a recurring transaction or template.

For example, I am a freelance translator. How much I get paid by whom and when fluctuates, but most software aimed at small businesses is already way overkill for me. So having a way to simply track “I expect X amount of money from person Y sometime later this month” would help me a lot.

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Off-topic: Something that bothers me about many finance apps (especially free software) is that they treat everything you input as absolute truth and don’t really work with some of the uncertain and unstable living situations that might prompt someone to install a personal expense tracker. And it’s hard to work with software like that when you have ADHD as well. Lack of flexibility and dictating a bookkeeping style turns it into an annoying chore and it’s hard to make the habit stick.

Bagels so far works better for me than everything else because it gets two things right that others don’t: Not demanding too much attention from the user (few screens and dialogs, few data inputs), and making it easy to correct past mistakes without making you go through hell for violating accounting theory.

[Kerryhen]

Yeah, i find this too, and bonus, if i make an record for an future data, i can't remove this record since i cant see in the manager or in the records page since it won't "go to" futher than today, so i can create, but cant remove until it happens haha.