Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

buddy was designed top down to work on categories. So all your expenses and budgets are categorized.
There is no concept of a single budget for all expenses, its always per category.
At the moment you could assign a budget to each category if you like to carry on. This is more of a real world scenario , isnt it ?

I do see your point, not promising anything, but I shall give it a thought and see if I can update this without losing the original concept.

cheers

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Is it me or is there no option to change the language inside buddy? And also, I wasn't able to enter a currency sign which was longer than 3 digits like for example Swiss Francs (CHF). If you could implement these features it would be a tad better than it is now :D

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

as mentioned in my update post
Buddy will open in the language based on what locale you have set on the device.

Yes, seems like some currencies are 3 characters, will allow this from the next update, note its only cosmetic now since I havent implemented any currency conversions as of now.

thanks for the feedback.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

hmm, i think i'd have this program function differently. i'd rather have the option of inputting a monthly recurring salary and then deciding how much money goes into which category for budgeting:

• Salary (let's say 3800)

Now that you have monthly income (which would be the case with almost everybody) you can make a budget with categories:

• Food = 400
• Phone = 200
• Internet = 75
• Clothes = 150
• TV = 120

Now you have your budget. As soon as you have an expense on let's say food you'll input the amount like 200 and save it under the category "Food". Now, you have actually used 200 and have 200 left for food. Let's say you overspend on food with 300, that would create a deficit of 100 in the food category. The Categories in expense are of course the same ones as the ones created in the budget plus a "Miscellaneous" expense category where unplanned expenses, like spontaneously deciding to get flowers for your girlfriend, will be subtracted from the remaining amount of salary after budgeting. This approach, imo, is more true a real world scenario. :D

Edit:
then again, I can budget my stuff beforehand, create the categories, make them recurring and it'll turn up the same way, except i can't really account for random expenses :cool: would there be a way to account for random expenses?

PS:
I forgot to thank you for this great program. Thank you! I also donated a bit to show my support of this program :) Keep the good work up!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

The "Tally and Save" functionality was added exactly for this purpose so you can keep your expenses in check.
So when you are reported of a deficit for a category by Buddy you can then go and increase your budget for that category and this will also let you know you are overspending.

But I do see your point , and a nice one indeed to have a Misc category where the extra funds could be made to flow into deficit budgets , is that right ?
What happens when the Misc budgets are used up ? just report a deficit ?
In fact just from the top of my head It could also be an income concept where you mention your total income for periods, besides expenses and budgets and one could configure funds to flow from the income automatically when the budgets for any category go in deficit.

I think this would also help snowman in his usage from his comments above.

do you think thoughts match ?

Appreciate it !
You could thank me by simply clicking "thanks" on the posts you liked :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Yes, that's correct.

Since you don't know what you'll buy at any given time (maybe you see a rare item on a market or something with collector's value and didn't even incorporate that into budget) it wouldn't be budgetable, it would just have to create a deficit.

Yes, that is what I was trying to get at in my last post :). I was a little bit confused because I couldn't enter my monthly income and then make a budget with the money coming in each month. So you'd have:

• Income with subcategories (source of income)
  • Salary
  • Yard Sale
  • Tax Returns

• Budget (how you plan to spend your income in any given category)

• Expenses (what you actually spent your income on in any given category).

:cool:

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Hmm, will have to sit over this.
IMO it will only complicate the usage/design of Buddy to have different categories in the income especially if they dont match up to the categories in the budget/expense.
I would say just keep income as a single entity and can be defined per period.

So something like this
Income 01Jan2010 - 31Dec2010 £40000
Income 01Jan2011 - 31Jul2011 £25000
Income 01Aug2011 - 31Dec2011 £20000

then one can define bugdets like this
food 01Jan2010-31Dec2010 allocated: £200 max: £300
gas 01Jan2010-31Dec2010 allocated: £100 max: £120

if your expense for food or gas goes above the allocated then we extract funds from the income and increase this budget till the max or till the income becomes zero.
Once the budget reaches max there will be no more allocation and
any further expense wil be overspending.

how does that sound ?

again these are just quick thoughts, might need to have a deeper understanding because I remember how much it took to make buddy generic suited to most usecases.

thanks for the valuable inputs. Its been a nice discussion. :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

yes thats what i had in mind :) I'd like to hear what you come up with after giving it some thought :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

yeah..this is kinda like what i was talking about..that would be really great if you could implement that..Handy Expense on symbian works like that..you can make a list than input an expense 'Type' in that list..a category would be like 'Personal', 'Business'...nice program though..trying it out still to fit my use..thanks

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

@krk969
thanks for creating this piece of software

right after seeing it i have donated for it as i thought it looks useful. installation was difficult since in the install file on your website you list the wrong repo :( or have a mistake somewhere in the path. i installed extra devel (why extra devel?) manually and found buddy.

The key i received by email after donating did not work :( with the exact error message key invalid