Scheduled or preset funding
S
Sarah
I love the idea of the auto fund feature you have that allows easy quick allocation based on the priority of each envelope because it’s flexible for changing incomes, but often people are payed weekly or Biweekly and so they may not want to fill the whole goal amount needed for the month, and for people who have very precise incomes that can be scheduled out to the T it can be very frustrating to need to individually go to envelopes and fill them when they could be automated, And sometimes a persons funding priorities may be different then the way they want to organize their envelopes
I could think of 2 ways to fix this issue
1
So what if there was a way to schedule funding into all your envelopes based on an amount? It would need the ability to be edited though to be most useful incase something needed changing, right now if you do that it becomes a positive expense and doesn’t go towards funding.
2
Or probably a better way, creating a preset for funding that can be reviewed and adjusted for small changes in income that doesn’t rely on the budget goal to determine how much goes where, this would allow people who have a constant income to fund everything all at once at any interval they desire by changing the amount they put into each envelope to fit their monthly needs based on the amount of times they are payed per month
Things to consider
Ability to save multiple presets
Ability to change the priority of funding envelopes to something different in the present then the organization of envelopes on the home page because funding priorities may be different then how we want them organized for viewing.
Maybe the ability to enter a percentage as a funding amount
I know this might be a lot of work and take time to incorporate, but if people are interested, I think it would increase the usability of the app to fit more people’s needs, and save time when funding envelopes.
Igor
Sarah
Scheduled funding sounds like a nightmare to code. Let's put that one on the back burner, as you also say option 2 might be better.
I have some questions about that.
First, are you a month ahead? I am one month ahead in my budget, so when my paycheck comes in, I move to the next month to fund those categories. In that case, I don't care which order they are funded in, or if they're half funded or not, because I know by the time the 1st of the month comes, all of my categories will be fully funded from my paychecks from the previous month. If you're not a month ahead, then this makes total sense, so I'm just trying to see how you budget today.
There is another feature request called "Fund Half" where Stevan says he'd like to have a quick-assign button that funds half of all categories. This is because he gets paid bi-monthly.
Sounds like these are slightly related, where yours gives you more granular control over how much goes into each category with the click of the button (preset).
And I do understand the order of the budget is often not related to the order you want to fund them. That was an oversight on my part because of what I mentioned that I only fund months in the future, so the order doesn't matter to me personally. You make a good point. I'm struggling to come up with a good way to display this in the app, though.
- Does a "preset" let you choose the percent on a category level? Like fund 50% of Groceries, 50% of Electricity, etc.
- What happens if the category is already 50% funded. Does it add on another 50%?
- What if the fund percentage is 40%? Does it fund 40%, then 40%, then 20%?
I have plenty more, but this will have to wait a bit anyway to, as you say, see if others are interested and for me to get more info from you and figure out how to solve this.
I
think
a simpler approach might be to add due-dates on the categories. Then, when you auto-assign, it funds categories with the earliest due date instead of simply from top to bottom.