Comment by TheLittleMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheLittleMuppet | Hacker News Reader

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TheLittleMuppet

Hi !

This looks great !

Vim like keybindings are always welcome ;-)

Unfortunately, I don't have any background in Go, I'm a bit at a loss on how to install it !

I looked at both your demos though.

Although I'm not up to date with what's usually done in terms of accounting / ledger software but I have the following remark :

- Is it intuitive to create transaction in advance to simulate a budget ?

Sharing an account with my wife where both our wages are wired, I'm interested at the end of the month to know how much I was wrong about alloted budgets and how much my monthly allowance will be ;-). I would find a separate view with information about where I spent more than expected very practical !

Also, don't you think jcb could benefit from a specific view with the list of currently alloted sums by categories with the ability to see a history for each sum (where each new entry would become the current budet and a comment explaining why a budget was raised or lowered) ?

> I'm a bit at a loss on how to install it !

If there is a release for your os/arch, then download the binary and put it in /usr/local/bin/jcb (you may need to chmod +x it). Otherwise you'll need to get golang and run "make build" which will get you a ./jcb binary.

> Is it intuitive to create transaction in advance to simulate a budget ?

You raise some interesting points that I need to think more about. I've just been making placeholder transactions to pad out the budget while I don't know exactly what the months transactions will be. It makes it hard to know where you stand midway through the month. At the end of the month you can see exactly how much you spent, but you can't see how much you budgeted once you delete the placeholder.

> You raise some interesting points that I need to think more about. I've just been making placeholder transactions to pad out the budget while I don't know exactly what the months transactions will be. It makes it hard to know where you stand midway through the month. At the end of the month you can see exactly how much you spent, but you can't see how much you budgeted once you delete the placeholder.

That's why I was thinking about two separate budget views - A general budget view where you can see your latest budget, i.e. the sums budgeted for each category of expenses/incomes - A specific budget report where you can see where you stand in terms of budget. It shouldn't have to be at the end of the month but it could be viewed anytime.

Thanks. That clears it up a lot. I'll probably start hacking something in the next few days and see where it takes me. I've created an issue where you can track or discuss it further.

https://github.com/jonhiggs/jcb/issues/19

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