Budgets and custom properties (Android)

This article is about Monetal, the mobile app which helps people write his own finance story. Read more at www.myMonetal.com and join today!

I have long been asked to add budgeting to the app, but I couldn’t come up with a solution that would really help. After all, the expense screen already shows spending by category, so I wanted something more than a warning when overspending.

Budgets are available in beta version and you need to be a beta tester ti use it.

To get started with budgets, open the Monetal and click the Expenses tab. Under expenses for the month, you will see three parameters-expenses for the day, income for the day, and the number of transactions. Tap and hold them to go to the budget Editor page. This is a temporary way to open editor, after release it will change.

In the Budget Editor, you enter script to define your parameters and budgets. Let’s start with this script:

Pets: Cat + Dog

Naturally, you should have Cat and Dog categories, and if you haven’t, replace with any others. Now go back to the expense page and find the new Pets parameter below the standard three, and its calculated value. Clicking on a parameter displays its calculation script.

Class, but where are the budgets? Go back and finish:

Pets: Cat + Dog < 4000

Now on the expense page, in addition to the new parameter, a budget panel has appeared on top. Unlike spending, it shows the amount of remaining funds. If the budget is over, it is highlighted in red.

When we want to set a budget for a category, we can skip the name:

// Budget for category
Lunch < 5000
// Budget for group of categories
[Entertainment] < 14000
// You also can write comments!

In the first case, we specify a budget for the Products category. In the second, with square brackets [], the budget for the entire group of categories.

How do I know that I spend the budget faster than planned?

Append hashtag #% after the budget to display its percentage of the balance:

[Grocery] < 14000 #%

If it is less than the percentage of the remaining days then you spend faster than necessary. In this case, Monetal will highlight the percentage in red.

Show me something interesting!

You can set as many budgets as you want at the same time, each starting on a new line. Let’s define the next budget:

Obligatory expenses: Food + Lunch + Transport + Taxes + Cat

There are system categories [ — ] and [ + ], which indicate expenses and income for the month. We will add one more budget:

Non-obligatory expenses: [-] - Obligatory expenses

Have you noticed that you can use previously defined budgets in subsequent budgets? Let’s add one more budget and get:

Obligatory expenses: Food + Lunch + Transport + Taxes + Cat
Non-obligatory expenses: [-] - Obligatory expenses
Economy ratio: Obligatory expenses / [-] * 100

If you want, you can add < to “Non-obligatory expenses” to set a limit, just like we did before.

You can also count events using this syntax:

Visits to fitness: #FitnessVisit

More about events you can read in this article.

Cool! What else would I need?

Several tags are predefined and can optionally be added at the end of a line:

#bold - budget has bold text
#year - budget will be shown just for years 
#month - budget will be shown just for months
#red - use red color for line
#green - use green color for line
#blue - use blue color for line
space - some space between items

The system works very flexibly and you can come up with any combination of formulas with your categories. For example, here is the script that I use:

space
Obligatory expenses: Food + Lunch + Transport + Taxes + Cat #bold
Non-obligatory expenses: [-] - Obligatory expenses #bold
Economy ratio: Obligatory expenses / [-] * 100 #bold
space
Extra income: [+] - Salary
Food/month: Food / 12 #year
//Budgets
space
Food < 20000
Transport < 2000

And the result of his work:

This is only the first version of the budgets and, most likely, some changes in the functionality will be made in the future. If you have any thoughts or comments, please write to the forum.

This article is about Monetal, the mobile app which helps people write his own finance story. Read more at www.myMonetal.com and join today!