On Mar 6, 2009, at 10:45 AM, makani wrote: > I have marked the buckets as tax-related, and this will definitely be > helpful. I could create a separate personal and business MoneyWell > document, and I may well do that. > > However, the fundamental issue is that my budgeting categorization > needs (what buckets I want) are a little bit different than my > reporting needs. I want to keep the buckets simple -- one bucket for > Work -- but taxes require that I break that down more. I could create > multiple Work buckets that match the taxes, but then I would spend > extra time transferring money between buckets. Instead, I would do the > tax categorization manually. But that's not ideal either. > > I'd rather see another field added to transactions, a Category. In > most financial applications, this exists, but Buckets don't. Now, for > me, if I have to choose, I think I'll take Buckets over having a > Category field. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me > that I want both. Budgeting needs just are not always identical to > reporting needs. When I have had only a Category available to me, I > have had to manually do budgeting, which is a lot of work. In > MoneyWell, where buckets are available, I'm facing the prospect of > doing some parts of my reporting manually, which will be less work > than an entire manual budget, but still not ideal. > > Thinking about it, there are actually lots of cases where having a > Category, even with Buckets, would be nice. I definitely agree with > the MoneyWell notion of a "spending plan" vs. a budget, and love how > well the Buckets facilitate that. However, I think it would be nice to > be able to analyze spending within a Bucket. > > Example: Say we have an Education bucket (we homeschool) that gets > $100 added to it monthly. We'd like to save up to get a new computer > for the kids to use, but it keeps getting emptied. So we want to > analyze a bit what we're spending our money on to help us figure out > what we can cut back on so we can accrue enough money in that bucket > for the computer. We can look at the list of Payees, and Memos, but > the most helpful in this situation would be a Category field. > > As far as I can tell, Category is not something available in MoneyWell > right now. Will this stop me from purchasing it? Probably not, > assuming the Buckets, and Transaction Importing & cleanup work as well > as they appear to. The budgeting power still just seems to sweet to > pass up. But I've definitely convinced myself at least that having > Category would be a helpful addition. (Assuming I'm not just missing > some feature of the app -- please tell me if I am). > > Thoughts?
Actually, categories and buckets are the same thing. MoneyWell creates buckets from Quicken categories when you import a file. The difference is that Quicken allows subcategories and MoneyWell doesn't. The reason is that envelope budgeting is meant to be kept simple and some of the extreme category lists that have been created in Quicken documents (mine included) are way to complex to properly visualize as a list of buckets. Because there are times when reporting needs to be more detailed than budgeting, a future version of MoneyWell will offer tags as well as buckets. This will allow you to tag a special event or tag transactions for a specific person to report on his or her spending. I think that will cover most of the needs. There is also a "wish list" feature coming where you can establish a list of purchases and save up for them inside of MoneyWell. Peace, Kevin Hoctor [email protected] No Thirst Software LLC http://nothirst.com http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
