Let's make budgets rock!

It would be nice if the show horizontal bar charts for each item in the budget giving you an instant visual on progress - instead of the big squares. To give an instant visual of deviation from perfectly matching your budget, you could show green to the left of center when under budget, red to the right of center when over budget (with the distances left and right proportional to how over/under budget you are).

The portfolio tracker from MarketWatch does very nicely at showing a visual representation of variance in an individual stock price and demonstrates the concept above:




A small graph above the budget history would be useful. Last 12 months on the X axis, and +/-% variance on the Y axis showing you rising above and dipping below the 0% variance line. Green fill below 0% and red fill above, The ability to see a graph of this type for each item in current 30 days main section would be useful too - perhaps when you click a row, a graph slides down.

I think a historic view of budgets should be a higher priority than forecasting potential spending.

The ability to revise a budget monthly seems essential. After all, what is all the visualization functionality for if not to help you tweak your plan? Once a budget seems to not need any more tweaking, then it would be static by virtue of not being tweaked.

1. I would have to revise monthly due to medical and child expenses.
2. Forecasting view identifying potential spending is my biggest concern. I need to see how a recent un-budgeted expense will affect my checking account 3-6-12 months down the road.
3. split tagging is one of those nice to haves when I get time to devote to it. The primary use would be in shopping at the big box stores. My wife can do grocery, home maintenance and clothes shopping in one place. That can be frustrating trying to figure out what went where if she looses the receipt.

You know what would be really cool if there was a way to link to Walmart, Target and other stores to enter in receipt numbers and download your receipt directly! Then splitting and price comparisons would be so much easier!

I still can't log into the beta for some reason, but I like what I see and am hearing about.

the budget needs more detail. it would be great it we can chart our progress over time. it would be even more amazing if we can chart that according to goals set as well... and speaking of goals.....

...and speaking of goals.... are we now able to create goals based on overall net worth, tracking by combining different accounts and categories together?.. do you get what i mean?

...why am i a cupcake?.. anyways..

i have a great networth spreadsheet that i'd be happy to share if you want. i'd need to send to you over email though. let me know if you'd like this. i'd be happy to help.

...by the way... split tagging is very essential, since it's easy to buy household goods and groceries at the same place.

oh, another thing i thought of... we should be able to go back and adjust our budgets. i get that we want to keep a true picture but we should be able to adjust retroactively, in case of miscategories, right?

also. i know that these notes are beyond the scope of your 3 questions, but it would be really great if we can drill down by the expense categories on the right..... even after the month is complete. Currently it's static.

The bar graph, and/or line graph tracking progress for spending behaviours would be awesome.

Hope these comments help!! i'm excited for you!

I'm a Dave Ramsey listener so every dollar has a name.
I'm not sure how detailed others want to get but allowing to budget on both a fixed dollar amount, as well as a variable dollar amount would be great. That way if income fluctuates, the program still would know where to put the money.

Quick example.
10% gross tithe
10% gross retirement
$1000 mortgage
$200 car
$200 utilities
$200 food
50% net entertainment
50% net emergency fund

As long as I make at least 2000 in a month there is enough money to fund all the categories. If there isn't 2000 in a month you could prompt the user that they are overspending, and that geezeo needs to know where to get the extra money from, or that they need to update their budget.
2000 = 1600 / 0.8 = (fixed amounts) / (1 - gross %'s)

At the end of the month unspent $'s should roll over to the following month. (for example i need to get gas about three times a month, if i get gas on the 10th and 20th in the first month and then on the 1st, 11th, 21st, and 31st in the second month, i'm not really over budget in the second month, It was just a timing issue.

This is basically the envelope system. Where every dollar you have is in one of many envelopes. Lets say i budget $100 a month towards vacation I'm only going to take money out of this envelope once a year. Similarly the retirement envelope isn't going to have money taken out of for a very long time.

With this system you do need to allow envelope transfers. For example lets say my utility bill is $250 this month, Maybe I transfer $25 from the emergency fund and $25 from the entertainment fund, into the utility fund.

This would work very well with the boxes that you currently have (only instead of %'s you show $'s.)

Also if you made them a little smaller you could have a row for various broad budget categories like day-to-day, monthly bills, occasional items, long term. My categories might be:

Food, Gas, Entertainment
Mortgage, Utilities, Insurance
Repairs, Vacation, Emergency Fund
New Car, College Fund, Retirement

Split tagging is a must! I make many trips to Target with purchases of food & household products.

I'd also like to be able to manually input transactions and then match that transaction once it's posted online (pay rent on the first with check, but it doesn't get cashed until mid month).

Most things I budget for are monthly, but other things are more long term like a vacation. It'd be nice to have a virtual piggy bank where I can set aside funds for a big purchase. I'd like to be able to set the amount needed and the date I need it by, then be shown how much I need to put away each month/week/day and then show me if I'm on track with the savings or how much I'm behind based on the amount I should be putting away each month/week/day.

I'd like to be able to create tag subcategories. For instance I create tags called "debt reduction:chase" and "debt reduction:bofa". This seems to throw things off when selecting them in budgeting. All the "debt reduction" entries seem to get bunched together. Is it possible to create these subcategories? I have tried several different ways with no luck.

Account credits need to be reflected in the budget categories. Last I checked this does not occur. Example: purchase X for $5, Y for $10, and assign to category Z. Category expenditure is incremented by $15 in the budget. Looks good so far. Return X to the store. The credit card now shows a $5 credit in category Z; however, the budget still says $15 instead of $10.

I agree with Timothy. I was going to comment on that but he beat me to it.

Tags should come from a drop down menu with an option to manage tags instead of just typing them in because sometimes I forget what tags I've created for the random purchases I make. If I purchase something for my computer I have to remember if I created a separate tag just for "computer" or was I lumping it all into "electronics"? If there was a drop down menu I could see that "computer" is an option so I would use that tag. This also goes along with the tag grouping mentioned above.

One more thing is that I would like to be able to see all my expenses, not just the top 5. Also it would be nice if I was able to drill down to see the purchases of those expenses.

I'd like to see the ability to differentiate between long-term and short-term budgets. That is, I might budget most of my expenses monthly, but there's no way to account for saving for items, like the purchase of a new computer or a new car, or for something like 'vacation'.

I might have a vacation budget of $1000 a year, and dip into that once or twice a year, but never touch it during the other months. For that matter, I might have a budget that is 'car maintenance' that gets touched every three months or so. A way to reflect this (someone up thread hit on it sort of with the envelope analogy) would be very, very nice.

Lots of suggestions about budgets:
1) Need a way to delete a spending target I set by accident - it's a duplicate of another I already set
2) I'd like to be able to move the spending targets around - reorder them
3) It would be great to be able to group the spending targets
4) Spending Target / Budget Details page - should be able to edit the value set for the target on this page too
5) Spending Target / Budget Details page - when you have a target which is the same amount every month the Monthly Spending chart's labels in red to the right of the chart are overlaid on top of each other and cannot be read
6) Spending Target / Budget Details page - Spending by Comparison chart - should always have the target being viewed as one of the item in the chart (to compare) instead of now what looks like the top 6 tags when viewing a target that is not in the top 6
7) When creating a new spending target you have the dropdown menu of tags (great!) - can you hide tags that are already setup as spending targets (to eliminate the duplicate problem)
8) editing a spending target - the form is at the bottom of the page; form should either be up by the target being edited and "unhidden" when the edit link is clicked or the page should jump down to the form

Ok, I have read through these but may have missed this above.
1. I would like to be able to create a tag on the fly when creating a budget. This means I can budget ahead of time instead of AFTER I have already spent the dough!

Forgive me if this has been mentioned above and for it's length ( I did read through them all, but you never know what the eyes miss)

It would be great to have a "printer friendly" version of your budget. Taking that even further, would be different "printer friendly" versions for whatever types of views end up in the live budget functionality. For example, it would be great to print the standard Geezeo budget layout, but if you folks are adding multiple ways to view ones budget, (say pie charts or whatever) those would also be nice to print.

Real life application you wonder?

This came to me as I was "discussing" money with my wife. She tends to be the budget breaker since I manage the money. Although I try very hard to keep her up to date (Yes, this includes setting up her mobile phone to check everything from budgets on Geezeo to our direct bank account) she still slips up from time to time.

My point is, some individuals partners will never check this website, regardless of how much you beg them to be more invloved.

Having printer friendly versions would be a nice thing for this situation. Login to Geezeo in the morning, print the budget, place it someplace they can't miss it. Have them take it with them, etc. This will also increase their accountabilty, as each and everyday one could say "you know what's int he budget"

On a side note: Schools are making an attempt to bring budgeting and general economics back in to early childhood programs. (THANK GOD)

Teachers could use the Geezeo budget to track each students progress( as long as you implement manual transactions into budgets of course, since they may not be using real money for the lesson. It tends to be play money :) ) and print fun colorful for reports for them to study. Since most schools will not allow access to un-authorized sites, the teacher would use the accounts him/herself and let the students play with the reports. You could even plant the Geezeo branding all over that sucker, then once those kids hit XX age, they'll already be part of the Geezeo crew.

~Drayton

What's the deal with split tags, are they coming?
Same thing with negative split items, are they coming?