Upgraded interface, budgets, and more …
March 26th, 2009 by ShashankFolks,
We rolled out several important updates to the site last night:
Budgets
- Create budgets for different periods: weekly, monthly and yearly
- Specify start dates and balances for budgets which rollover
Interface changes
- Projections stands out separately, and is not hidden underneath Reports anymore
- Use of more graphics and icons as opposed to text, better colors and better layout
- No advertisements!
- Sync problems with several banks (including ING) have been fixed
Hope you like the new changes and find them useful!
March 27th, 2009 at 3:58 am
Hy !
Thanks for this new interface, it’s really more “professional” and more pleasant.
Nevertheless, the projection are still going from 1st of the month to 31/30 of the last month. Each month, I receive my earning between 28 and 31 of the end of the month, then, projection are not true for me… because of the earning/expense between such 3 days not included in the maths.
Moreover, I tried to re-add a old budget, with a rollover and a start amount of money and I get each time an error. I send you a report about that.
I’m glad to see that buxfer is being better, smarter, and nicer month after month.
March 27th, 2009 at 4:54 am
Hi,
In my opinion, the new icons and interface isn’t more professional than previous…
The layout seemed unfinished in some aspects…
Regards
March 27th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Why no advertisements? Was it useless or payed accouns give enough money?
March 27th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Val,
Advertisements always harm the user experience. We have seen encouraging interest from users to pay for this product, and so we decided to roll out more “premium” features in the future, than bug users with not so useful advertisements.
March 27th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Reactions:
Okay, in general I like this. I really like how Projections are their own report, so that the start date can be set automatically (I hated having to manually tweak that in the old version). I like how projections now include both budgets and bill reminders. I like the new look. I like the yearly/monthly/weekly budgets, and the awesome rollover support.
Some nits:
1. I got a few crashes in the budgets. I reported one that’s now completely shut down my access to my budget tab. Oops :-).
2. It’s hard to redraw all of my budgets and bill reminders to be non-overlapping, which is needed since the new system automatically adds all the budgets in as monthly items. This might be easy if bill reminders could be assigned to tags, which would allow the projection system to know that they fell into a given budget. (This is a problem because most of my bill reminders actually belong to some budgeted tag, so my Projection claims I’m spending money twice as fast as I actually am.)
3. I’m sad to see that I can no longer edit bill reminders from the Projections interface. That was my favorite part — the calendar interface is _awful_, just the wrong thing for 99% of actual tasks. I suppose it might be nice to edit future budgets that way too, but please don’t take THAT as a suggestion unless it’s super easy.
-Wm
March 27th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
1. Yes, the budgets are is a little unstable. Please bear with us while we iron out the bugs.
2. Actually, the projection logic is already smart enough to discount reminder transactions out of the budget categories. Your bill reminder must have a description which matches one of your tagging rules and assigns the appropriate tag to that reminder. Then that transaction would be automatically discounted from the budgeted projections. There is no need to have an additional tags field in the bill reminder area
March 28th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Your recent fixes made the budgets stable so far, and it’s very nice to work with them.
I’ve now added tag rules for my top most expensive bill reminders, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the prediction amount — it’s still WAY negative. I even added renaming rules to the transactions, so they get assigned the same name as the bill reminder when they come in (and then the bill reminder’s rule assigns them a tag).
Question: is the projection logic smart enough to handle nested budgets? I had a couple, like my MonthlyDiscretionary and my Entertainment budgets, in which Entertainment is one of MonthlyDiscretionary’s subtags; I like seeing the breakdown, but at the same time I must know I’ve covered all my base categories.
March 28th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Ah, I found the problem. The projections logic doesn’t handle nested tags _at all_ — in addition to subtracting each of by bill reminders, it also subtracts the entire amount of MonthlyFixed, even though the bill reminders are assigned to subtags of MonthlyFixed.
Or at least it looks that way.
Well, now I have a possible workaround… I’m going to have to think about it, I use nested tags a LOT and don’t want to break my entire system.
March 29th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
The interface updates look fantastic. Buxfer is still my preference for account tracking and budgeting. Keep up the great work, fantastic web app!
Thanks Buxfer Team
March 31st, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Net loaned sum is displaying incorrectly after adding a new IOU bill. Please check.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Is there a place where I can learn how the rollover is supposed to work?
I am assuming that is I create a budget for $100 and only spend $75, then the next month $25 rolls into that budget to give me $125. On the other hand, if I spend $120, then the next month the leaves me with $80.
Is that how it’s supposed to work?
April 6th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Yes, that’s correct.
April 9th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Hi there,
About the projection, if I set up a bill reminder supposed to start in september (the 28th), I can see it starting immediatly in the projection list (28th of April).
Your website is great, just need to be fixed a little ;)