Budgeting can often feel overwhelming, especially when just starting out. That's why I'm thrilled to share what I'm working on for the past month, Budget Kanban, a visual tool to easily manage project finances using Kanban boards.
With Budget Kanban, you gain: 1. Real-time visibility into each project's financial status: Keep track of your finances effortlessly, knowing exactly where each project stands financially. 2. Stress relief from having an organized and easily understandable financial overview: Say goodbye to financial chaos and hello to clarity and peace of mind. 3. Reduction of time spent on manual data entry and corrections: Streamline your workflow and spend less time on tedious tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters. 4. Enhanced ability to identify and rectify budget issues swiftly: Spot potential issues early on and take proactive measures to address them, preventing headaches down the road. 5. Increased accuracy in budget allocation and monitoring: Make informed decisions with confidence, ensuring your resources are allocated efficiently and effectively.
I'd love for you to give Budget Kanban a try and share your thoughts .
Have a fantastic day! - Just
Kanban don’t seem like the right abstraction for financial planning.
How does this actually prevent budget overrun when nothing is automated? It seems like the data is only accurate if someone correctly enters it and drags the boxes into the appropriate columns.
The app looks nice, but this feels like a solution in search of a problem.
You could easily pivot to project management and you’d have a very nice looking product. Ditch the budget stuff, it doesn’t work.
The problem is sometimes things aren't ideal or simple to represent. A spreadsheet forms no restrictions so you can ad-hoc futz with split transactions and all sorts without shooting yourself or getting stuck. Every other way of handling this is just pain and friction.
I don't think this makes any sense for personal finance.
However, this product seems to use a planning and collaboration methodology to track actual money movement. Something that might work for personal use but has little-to-no place in a company.
I was interested in this, but not being able to clone it from GitHub and run it on a local machine, immediately turned me off and made me think "this is nothing but an ad".
I wonder if maybe another useful feature would be to schedule a card to be automatically moved to another column at a certain date for things like contract fulfillment, or schedule a recurring card to be added each month for paychecks and monthly bills. Or is that already a feature? I could also see building upon that to see a rudimentary forecast of the state of finances at specified dates in time.
I have a harder time imagining this for business use cases, unless maybe you really focus on the approval/reimbursement flows.
YNAB and other tools dont seem to help me there.
I swear by YNAB, it might be costly but it saves me way more money than it costs so I consider it worth it.
> not only projects cash over time by including known expenses and incomes over time, but adjustments so I can actively reconcile
To me I would say YNAB does all of that for me, I use goals in YNAB and that gives me the projection I need. The biggest piece that's missing for me (and maybe this is what you're referring to) is how can I be sure all of my goals for the month/year add up to what I'm projecting that I"m actually making. I go to a spreadsheet for this about once a year to be sure my goals aren't impossible. But to be fair it's pretty obvious when this is happening as my goals are red for each month.
Generally when I see folks complain about what you're complaining about and I walk through their finances they tend not to actually be budgeting, they really just want a way to look at where their money is going historically and have a couple buckets for saving cash. Mint was good at this (it's finished now) but I think YNAB and apps like it (Lunchmoney) are better
For me, my projections are more accurate than YNAB beceause my expenses are not static. My home heating will drop off now its spring and my AC bill will start going up in July. I copy expenses from previous years over and adjust as I go.
For example last week
DATE PLANNED ACTUAL TYPECODE DESC RUNNING RECON
03/21/24 -250.00 -$208.52 X GROCERY $XXX.XX 41.48
So then later when I project the next month I go and look at budget versus actuals and so forth.
My use case is really cash flow management not savings goals, I have that as an expense that sends it into a separate bucket.
Kanban was born to help mass produce mechanical parts, and for that's is very effective, but to follow or design things, like many do today, it's not good at all IMVHO...
A small example: let's imaging you auto-import your groceries thanks to some supermarkets that offer csv export of tickets. If you track expenses you do not know nothing beside a total amount or at maximum a total amount per vendor. If you track in double-entry you can slice your transactions as much as you want: you have the total amount of groceries, the total amount per vendor, but potentially the total amount of cheese, meet, salad and so on. The total amount of cheese regardless of where you bought it I mean. Automagically you have your stock and also a diary balance of what you eat. All on the same data.
Budgeting up front is the same, you can create nth accounts and "move money" between them, with all balancing options at hand.
No UIs can compete with autocompleted text and views eventually generated from it, entirely user-constructed, with graphs of any kind, statistics and so on.
Finally there is a bottomline: tracking finances, notes, ... are long-term stuff, switching tools in most cases, especially switching modern tools, is a nightmare. Text can be manipulated easily and any workflow in the end might be bend easily, UIs are a different story, switching even if you have some export-then-import ability mean also learn a new workflow adapting yourself to the tool instead of the contrary. So far NO ONE on Earth have succeeded crafting something as flexible as text an UIs built out of it.
Kudos on getting my email —— I hope I don't get any marketing materials I didn't consent to.
If you'd like, I can delete your account. Just use the feedback widget on the site to let me know which account you want to be deleted. Also, rest assured, I don't send any marketing materials.
(Hopefully you get acquired sometime soon, and then "you"'ll be sending marketing materials :P -- like it or not.)
No thanks.
But yeah, trial would be nice.
I still sort of hope for a good FOSS budgeting software for Apple's devices but I'm currently using Copilot (not the AI front-end) and like it so far.
EDIT:
I would say the issue with budgeting software is that overall it's not going to be something that offers hockeystick growth for investors, because there's really only so much that business problem needs. I need a list of accounts with fresh data imported from the financial institution's servers (securely), and a way to CRUD the transactions on that account in ways that make sense of the data. That's... it. There is no new frontier. It's 100% dull-as-dishwater, boring-but-necessary responsible adult stuff. Add in the part where more people would like you not to sell their financial info or advertise a slate of financial services to them, and really you just don't have a lot of revenue opportunities.
There's been Manage Your Money, Microsoft Money... what else has been released then put to pasture?
My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.
