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How do you set up your transactions so that Projections are most useful?
I love the Projections report; use it all the time. But there are four (!!) ways to affect it: setting a budget, making a Bill Reminder, making a Repeating Transaction, and marking a transaction as pending. Which of those work best? I'll discuss the pros and cons I see in my first reply to this. Some of them are bugs.
I’m unsure
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Inappropriate?Budgets seem to be easy to use, reliable, and best of all you can always tell what transactions count against each budget. The only shortcoming is that they're imprecise.
There's one "con" to using budgets... Sometimes other things are needed, and it's very hard to tell how things work together to generate a projection report. This is obviously a problem for things like bill reminders; they get subtracted from the projection, but even though every bill reminder is a budgeted item (normally), their budgets ALSO get subtracted from the projection, so I wind up counting everything twice. Ouch.
It's also unclear how nested budgets get counted -- for example, I used to have a weekly budget for groceries, and a monthly budget for Shopping (which was the parent of Groceries). But both got subtracted every week/month, which counted Groceries twice. (That bug may have been fixed -- I haven't heard and didn't check since.)
I’m satisfied
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Inappropriate?The next option is Bill Reminders. Bill reminders, unlike budgets, are precise and timely, so that large and sporadic bills (like property taxes) can be planned for. The problem? Well, they can't be assigned to a specific account, so the ability to project the balance of a specific account doesn't work. As I mentioned, they also don't play nicely with budgets.
I’m not entirely confident
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This answers the question
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This problem has been fixed. You can edit your existing reminders and assign them to a specific acccount. -
Two responses:
1. Wow, that's awesome. That makes Bill Reminders the leading option.
2. Except it doesn't work; a Bill Reminder that's assigned to a specific account normally shows up as being worth $0 when you're looking at "All Accounts". That means the main Projection report is wrong. And the Account projections are just obviously wrong (I don't know why, they don't take into account most future transactions for some reason). -
I am not able to reproduce any of these issues. Can you drop an email to support [AT] buxfer? I might need some more information from you. Thanks!
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Inappropriate?Next we have Repeating Transactions. These are like Bill Reminders, except that they also allow you to see which category and account/budget the transactions will come from. They seem perfect -- but the reality is less perfect.
First of all, in practice they seem to affect the Projections exactly the same as a Bill Reminder -- they don't affect the account or budget they're actually drawn out of. I think this is probably just a "quirk", and hopefully it'll get fixed. In the meantime there's no reason to use them.
Second -- and this is the clincher for me -- when the date on a Repeating Transaction comes by, Buxfer dumps a copy of the old transaction into my account at the current date, and that copy includes the check mark that says I've already paid the bill!!!! Whoah -- unless I go to my bank and double-check, I can't use Buxfer to tell me whether or not I've paid my property taxes (or whatever) this year!
I’m guarding against betrayal
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Inappropriate?Finally, we have Pending transactions. These are entirely precise and unambiguous; they get deducted on the correct date from the correct account and budget. It's a little inconvenient that they only work for one-time transactions.
So my only complaint with them is that due to a bug in the Projections report, when you try to set a Repeating Event as a Pending Transaction, it gets explicitly counted twice! Yes, you'll see it on the list of upcoming events twice. There's nothing you can do aside from never marking a repeating transaction as pending, which of course means that you can never tell whether you've paid a repeating transaction.
So... Don't Do That. Just use Pending transactions for one-off events, or manually copy them -- or just accept that they appear twice in the Projections report.
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?I use a mix of Budget and Bill reminds and as you described on your first post at the end it get counted twice.. I didnt find a solution for that neither...
I’m really frustrated
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Inappropriate?Update: It looks like Buxfer is making some changes to the Projections report, although right now it's making the bugs worse.
Today I noticed one of the odd duplicated entries in the Projections report (caused by a repeated event, which gets counted once as a Bill Reminder and once again as a Pending transaction): the duplication was counted as $0, which would have corrected the problem, except that BOTH duplicates were counted as $0 (oops). The result was that the Projection is WILDLY too high, since this is a regular BIG expense.
It's good to see some changes; it's unfortunate to see unfinished work deployed. This particular error's been deployed for at least a month.
I’m ambivalent
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This answers the question
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It really looks like using repeated events is a very bad idea for Projections. I'd better switch over to using Bill Reminders and Budgets, and just accept the possible inaccuracy. By the way, I hear that anytime you have an automatic tagging rule that matches a repeating event's name, that repeating event will be automatically put under that budget. I haven't confirmed whether that actually works, though (it's pretty hard to test, and VERY hard to configure).
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There is no difference as such between a bill reminder and a repeated event. A repeated event just has a transaction associated with it, whereas a bill reminder has only the required metadata (description, amount, account, date) associated with it. From the projection report point of view, both should work the same way.
Regd duplicate between reminders and budgets: yes, the solution is to provide a description to your reminder such that it will be autotagged under the corresponding budget. Any other ideas to make this easier?
