Better analysis for your finances
July 18th, 2008 by ShashankWe released a new look for our analysis page, with bigger, intuitive and more interactive charts:
- The pie chart is labeled “in-place”, so you don’t need to roll your eye-balls over to another part of the page to figure out what tag a particular slice represents
- A bar chart beneath the pie chart shows the income v/s expenditure trend for the particular tag you want to dig into
- A slider makes it smooth to go back and forth in periods of time (For those who remember, this slider is a MUCH improved version of the one we had back in June last year.)
Analyzing and understanding where your money is going is the first step towards good financial health. We hope our analysis tools are helping you realize your financial goals, more efficiently than ever before.
July 18th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I, for one, am finding this new layout a bit more difficult to navigate. I appreciate the big pie-charts with “in-place” labelling, but I’m finding it less flexible about presenting me with the information I want to display, how I want to display it.
For example, is there a way to bring up a list of all my incomes, and just my incomes, for the month of June? I can get it to show me a pie-chart of that, split by tags, but I need to see a list so I can see exactly what transactions that represents. Also, the pie-charts seem to discard small amounts (I’m looking at one now that has pie segments for $1425 and $86, but there’s another $37 that’s not showing up.
Another, minor complaint: the list of transactions below the chart seems to reset itself to sort by transaction amount every time I change screens. It would be a lot more useful if it would remember what I last had it set to, since I almost always want to see my transactions ordered by date.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Carlos,
Sorry about that. The layout is not the problem, its the listing of transactions underneath. I am working on that issue, and will release a fix very soon.
Thanks for being patient! :)
July 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Carlos,
I fixed the transaction list problem. If you click on More options -> Chart type -> Income, you will get a pie chart for your incomes and the transaction list will contain ONLY your income transactions.
I will notify you when I release fixes for the other 2 issues you mentioned … Can you also send us an email at support [AT] buxfer.com so that we can continue this conversation over email?
July 18th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
you may not want to use tilted pie charts:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/02/macworlds-iphon.html
July 18th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Newbie here and lovin’ Buxfer. So I’ve got a moronic issue here as anytime I try to access today I consistently see the following pop-up: “A New Version of Buxfer has arrived, this Page will Refresh Momentarily. What on earth am I doing wrong as it wont let me do anything?
Thank you!
July 19th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Update: Problem I’m experiencing only applies to Firefox. IE 7 no probs but cant access following changes with Firefox 3.0.1
July 19th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Hey Scott, Buxfer user/fan here. Clear your browsers cache that should do it.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Chris, my thanks as that did it. Sincerely appreciated!
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 am
Hi,
I’m very satisfied with your service, it’s excellent work! But before this release there were 3 option to analyze my income/expenses. Two remained in this version, the bar chart and the pie chart which are very useful, but I really miss the third one, the line chart.
Because for example, if I would like to view, how my Net Balance (or income/expense) changed during the time (for exmaple from 01.05.2008-01.07.2008), I can’t view it now. Only the summary of the selected period :(
Is there any possibility to bring the line chart back?
Have a nice day!
July 25th, 2008 at 8:32 am
I just want to say how pleased I am with the changes you have made to the Analysis portion of the website! This is exactly what I was hoping for. I really like having the ability to customize my graphs through the exclusion of tags, and the fact that drilling down on a section of my pie chart now produces a new pie chart of just that section. This really helps me quickly see where my spending is going. I haven’t fully explored the new features yet but I see a lot of potential.
I had submitted a suggestion a few weeks ago along these lines, so it’s really nice to see these changes appear. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who you received this kind of request from. Thanks for the improvements and keep them coming! (it would be nice to have more charting/analysis available in the “Budgets” area).
August 19th, 2008 at 5:42 am
DARKinVADER,
We have added a new line chart, for the trend in your account balance. It is kind of similar to the previous line chart we had. Do you find that helpful?
September 10th, 2008 at 10:06 am
When I view the Income report for a month in which there are multiple/various tags on the income, there are math errors on the pie chart. The largest slice of pie will be correct but the smaller slices will show incorrect totals compared to the detail items listed below. In one case an item is omitted entirely (no slice of pie is displayed to represent that tag). Perhaps that item would be too small to display. In this case it represents 1.75% of the total.
Does anybody else notice this problem with the pie chart subtotals being incorrect?
I do not notice this problem on the Expense report, only Income.
Thanks.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:30 am
“there are math errors on the pie chart”
Whew, I thought I was the only one. My biggest category is entirely gone from most months in the expense report; on the few months where it shows up, it’s WAY less than it should be. The other categories also have reductions, and it shows my Income as being zero.
It makes it hard to trust, although it seems that the system mostly works aside from the reports.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Perhaps most people are not checking it closely. I may not have noticed but I had a couple of situations where the amounts were very easy, for example $100 + $100 and I noticed the pie chart said $185. This caused me to look more closely and I found other errors.
I emailed a couple of screen shots illustrating the problem to support@buxfer.com. Perhaps you could do the same.
Thanks for your reply, Wm. I feel better knowing someone else has also noticed the problem.
October 7th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I hope you’re still reading this, Marty; I found the problem. The pie chart will hide any slices/categories whose net amount is non-positive — in my case, my “Monthly” category included my paycheck, so it almost never showed on the chart.
So… You might try finding all your income and moving it to a category used only for income.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Wm,
Yes, I am still reading this. Thanks for the reply. In my case, I do not believe your explanation applies. HOWEVER, it looks like they fixed something because I’ve just gone back to the report that I described in error and all the amounts are now correct. $100 + $100 now equals $200.
Thanks Buxfer people.