MoneyDance Monthly Budget Report

WARNING! As of 1/1/2024 I am no longer maintaining this code. It is freely available for someone else to pick up and maintain.

For help using this extension see the Wiki.

Monthly Budget Report is an extension for the Moneydance Personal Finance app to help you report how well you are meeting your monthly spending goals. The main reason to use this extension instead of the built in Moneydance budget report is that this extension properly handles negative budget amounts. I see a budget as being fluid throughout the year. Budget amounts always need to be updated throughout the year as spending changes and I like to be able to borrow from categories I'm under spending while allocating the extra to categories that are becoming overspent. There may also be special occasions, such as when someone refunds part of the money spent earlier in the year that you may need to enter a negative budget amount so that the budget accurately reflects the changes. An example would be for car insurance. At times our insurer may issue a refund of some of the earlier premium based on conditions during the year. Of course I could just adjust the earlier amounts to get to the proper amount spent but I'd rather be able to track exactly what happened in the budget. If you don't want that ability, you may just want to use the default Moneydance budget report.

Monthly Budget Report is a companion to to my Monthly Budget Editor that not only allows for negative budget amounts but also allows for easy entry of budget amounts in a compact spreadsheet style format. I have also created Monthly Budget Bars another companion that creates a Summary Page widget which also works properly with negative budget amounts.

Installation

1. Either build the source code or download the latest release.

2. Follow Moneydance's official documentation to install extensions.
   Use the Add From File... option to load the budgetreport.mxt file.

3. The extension has not yet been audited and signed by The Infinite Kind, so you'll get a warning asking you if you really want to continue loading the extension, click Yes to continue loading the extension.

4. You can now open the extension by going to Extensions > Monthly Budget Report.

Build

1. Clone the repository to your local system:

git clone https://github.com/jerrymjones/MonthlyBudgetReport.git <localfolder>

2. Initialize the folder structure for building. The following command needs to be executed in src/ i.e. cd <localfolder>/src:

ant init

3. Download the Moneydance Developer's Kit and extract it to a local folder on your system. Once extracted, copy-paste lib/extadmin.jar and lib/moneydance-dev.jar into the <localfolder>/lib folder:

cd tmp/
curl -O https://infinitekind.com/dev/moneydance-devkit-5.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf moneydance-devkit-5.1.tar.gz
cp moneydance-devkit-5.1/lib/* ... 

4. Generate a key pair (as required by Moneydance) to sign your locally built extension. You will be prompted for a passphrase that is used to encrypt the private key file. Your new keys will be stored in the priv_key and pub_key files. The command needs to be executed in <localfolder>/src:

ant genkeys

5. Build the extension from <localfolder>/src:

ant budgetreport

6. Install the extension per the installation instructions above using <localfolder>/dist/budgetreport.mxt as the file to load.