Details

Everyone has payments that need to go out weekly, fortnightly etc. Schedules would work with these payments and in combination with buckets, to ensure they that amounts needed are met on time by indicating via green/orange/red current values for scheduled events, and to automatically create expenses that have occurred since your last login. The reverse where money is expected on a regular basis would in turn add deposits that occurred since your last login. This makes management of bills/automatic payments easier to keep track of. It would also be constructed so that if a expense/deposit is created, you'll get alerts on the dashboard to review the payments made, with the ability to delete that payment, amend etc.

Model Implementation

• User has many schedules

• Bucket has many actions, has many schedules through actions

• Schedule model that belongs to account, has user through account, has many actions, has many buckets through actions. Has the fields:

  • id
  • account_id
  • name
  • scheduled_time
  • recurrence (in # weeks)
  • last_executed

• Action model that belongs to schedule, belongs to bucket. Has the fields:

  • id
  • schedule_id
  • bucket_id
  • type (expense/deposit/transfer)
  • amount (in $)

Routes Implementation

• /accounts/1/schedules
• /accounts/1/schedules/new
• /accounts/1/schedules/edit/5
• /accounts/1/schedules/show/5
• /accounts/1/schedules/destroy/5
• /buckets/5/schedules

UI Implementation

• Dashboard, Buckets show, and accounts show would get new widget "Upcoming Schedules" listing name and when. Clicking will take them to schedule show page, listing the actions that schedule has in details (what type, what bucket, how much) and showing how much in in there at present in the buckets it'll be taking action in. Depending on the pages visited, schedules will be constrained to that area (dash = all, account = only in account, bucket = only in bucket).

• Dashboard would get new widget "Recent Alerts" listing events that took place since the last login, with links to each transaction that took place for review.

  • (you may know of a faster more efficient way to do this, but the idea is here)
  • When you login, schedules are checked against the current time, scheduled time, and the last executed time. Formula for finding schedules via SQL is something like WHERE (Time.now > schedule.scheduled_time AND schedule.scheduled_time > schedule.last_executed ) (essentially, run schedules that have occurred prior to now, but after the last execution).
  • The schedule is then executed (its actions are run, depositing/subtracting money from the baskets it's tied to). and the alerts model is then populated as needed in a before_filter so alerts are available on the next request
  • The schedule is then either deleted if it isn't needed again, or is updated with Time.now for the execution time, and scheduled_time becomes scheduled_time + recurrence.weeks (where recurrence is number weeks after the last scheduled_time that is should run again)
  • A query is run again to ensure no more schedules have taken place (incase user doesn't login for 2/3 weeks. Something like this
    • while Schedule.count(:conditions => "#{Time.now} > schedule.scheduled_time AND schedule.scheduled_time > schedule.last_executed") > 0

• Any place where buckets are listed (account buckets, dashboard etc) get modified to include amounts of transactions coming within 7 days of today. The label will be colored according to time remaining and money available.

  • In the case that we have funds in that basket are met, the label is green
  • In the case that the funds in that basket are below required levels, and the next schedule is 2 or more days, the label is orange
  • In the case that the funds in that basket are below required levels, and the next schedule is within 2 days, the label is red

• Schedule show/destroy don't need any specific stuff, however add will need the following:

  • The link to the page will be within an account page, next to 'Buckets in xxxxx' called 'Add Schedule in xxxxx' (along with view schedules in xxxxx)
  • The new schedule form will need the following fields
    • Account selection dropdown (default to current account)
    • Actions section similar to multiple buckets expenses/deposit where you can add extra buckets. Each line has a bucket dropdown for the current account, a type dropdown (expense/deposit/transfer) and an amount). These populate actions association
    • First payment section where it has year, months and day fields. This populates the scheduled time field on creation
    • Recurrence section where you select either "one time payment" (for future payment usage, this would make recurrence fields nil) or you select the occurrence. Weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or a text fields to specify number of weeks. That amount is stored in the schedules recurrence field and used as described in the section on how alerts are created.

• Schedules should be able to be skipped. On the schedule show page, you should be able to "Skip the next occurrence", which would then make scheduled_time on the model == (scheduled_time + recurrence.weeks), effectively skipping it till next time.

Conclusion

I think think this feature would be quite useful. If you have any questions about its implementation, let me know.

not so much an issue to act on as notification of work in progress for anyone else who is interested...

both Simon Jefford and I have (independently) begun to work on internationalizing bucketwise (for en-UK and en-CA locales respectively)

our forks/branches reside at:

http://github.com/simonjefford/bucketwise/tree/britishify
http://github.com/sbfaulkner/bucketwise/tree/globalize

cheers.

When selecting which account/bucket is the source for a transaction, it'd be nice to see what the current balance is, as well.

Won't go into as much detail as my last ticket. Basically, you manually enter (unless you can link an API which would be neat) the current conversion rates for different countries into a Conversion model, then whenever you hover over a price, you can select a currency and it'll process it and show you how much it is. This will be handy if you want to buy something online using a CC, and want to know how much $$ you have left in that account in another currency. This'll tie in with account options for if/when bucketwise supports euros and such (instead of just dollars).

When someone edits an item that was made on the same date as another item, it gets repositioned higher in the list.

For people who want to structure their data, to compare against bank accounts, it becomes tricky when they edit an item.

http://github.com/KieranP/bucketwise/commit/3821ab2d362d6156e8644aa60dfdcdbd785291fe

Using that patch, it sorts by occurred_on, and then by id, to maintain the order people add items.

$ cap local externals:setup

  * executing `local'
  * executing `externals:setup'
configuring vendor/plugins/haml
remote: Counting objects: 12496, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4100/4100), done.
remote: Total 12496 (delta 8371), reused 12235 (delta 8111)
configuring vendor/rails
remote: Counting objects: 106035, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (23766/23766), done.
remote: Total 106035 (delta 82025), reused 104753 (delta 81038)
configuring vendor/plugins/calendar_date_select
remote: Counting objects: 1332, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (640/640), done.
remote: Total 1332 (delta 772), reused 973 (delta 570)
error: Untracked working tree file 'Readme.txt' would be overwritten by merge.
vendor/plugins/cached_externals/recipes/cached_externals.rb:54:in `load': Error checking out 88b7caf to /Users/jolma/depot/shared/externals/vendor/plugins/calendar_date_select/88b7caf7acecf31186661c0efd6bc606cdcc666d (RuntimeError)
    from vendor/plugins/cached_externals/recipes/cached_externals.rb:41:in `each'
    from vendor/plugins/cached_externals/recipes/cached_externals.rb:41:in `load'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/configuration/execution.rb:128:in `instance_eval'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/configuration/execution.rb:128:in `invoke_task_directly_without_callbacks'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/configuration/callbacks.rb:27:in `invoke_task_directly'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/configuration/execution.rb:81:in `execute_task'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/configuration/execution.rb:93:in `find_and_execute_task'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:45:in `execute_requested_actions_without_help'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:44:in `each'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:44:in `execute_requested_actions_without_help'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/help.rb:19:in `execute_requested_actions'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:33:in `execute!'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:14:in `execute'
    from /Users/jolma/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.5/bin/cap:4
    from /usr/bin/cap:19:in `load'
    from /usr/bin/cap:19

$ rails --version

Rails 2.3.2

$ ruby --version

ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i686-darwin9.6.0]

$ git --version

git version 1.5.5.1

$ cap --version

Capistrano v2.5.5

$ git log

commit 3797771
Author: Jamis Buck 
Date:   Mon May 25 22:04:55 2009 -0600

    update changelog

I would really like to have the option to have a comment when I do a bucket reallocation, otherwise sometimes it is easy to forget why I moved money from one bucket to another.

Once you've reconciled a statement, editing any event associated with that statement removes that event from the statement it was reconciled with, silently. This is because editing an event actually creates new line items, rather than trying to just update the existing line items.