Category: App updates

We have published a few minor updates as we get ready to remove the beta tag and replace it with an official tag.

Toggle Paid

If you use the show and hide paid toggle, you will no longer need to keep toggling it as you use the App – we have updated the App to retain your view preferred setting so where you go we display what you requested.

Improved budget item list search

We have reworked the search for the budget items list. The search will now match your search term against the name, description, and amount for each item, this should make it easier to find what you are looking for. Additionally, the entire row for a budget item will remain visible, not just the half containing the match.

Privacy Policy

We have added our privacy policy. There will be no surprises it when you read it; very simply we don’t track you and we will never sell or pass on your data.

Miscellaneous

We have also adjusted the spacing in a couple of sections, tweaked the footer, fixed an alignment issue on mobile and renamed the “back” button when viewing a budget item.

Official Release

The next release will be the official release. We need to do a final pass over the content and add more help pages. We’re aiming for the end of this week.

We have published another couple of updates and fixes for Budget, this time we reviewed the demo.

Demo

New users can load a demo on sign-in, this makes it easy to review the App design and all its features without first having to enter your data. The demo didn’t do a good enough job of highlighting the features of Budget so in addition to now including a one-off expense, the demo also includes examples of disabled, paid, and adjusted expense items.

The demo is now also aware of when it is created, one off and annual expenses will always be visible in the first displayed month.

Budget Overview

We have continued to tweak the Budget overview, we have added spacing to separate sections, adjusted text sizes where we felt necessary and tweaked the pagination so that you will always return to the projections.

Fixes

• When a budget item is deleted, local cache will be deleted if necessary.
• We have removed some unnecessary backend dependencies.

On the way

We have two major features on the way – support for batch actions (marking multiple expenses paid etc.) and budget overview sorting controls. These will be the last two major features before we remove the beta label.

We have published another couple of updates and fixes for Budget as we took another look at the projections and monthly totals.

Projections

We weren’t happy with our previous tweak so we had another go. The “Edit account” button didn’t seem in the right place and it felt like the dates and balances were not aligned.

Expenses per category

Below each month we have added a visual overview of the category splits for all your expenses. The ideal goal is 50% fixed expenses, 30% flexible expenses and 20% savings/pension – the little indicator gives you an idea of where you are.

Expense & Income per account

We have updated the total expenditure and income totals for each month. Rather than a single total value, we now provide a total per account and if there is more than one account, there is an overall total. The goal is that this should make it simpler to work out the budgeting requirements for each of your accounts.

Fixes

• We have fixed the navbar on all content pages, the menu should be in line with the logo.
• We have tweaked the Budget overview search when you type fewer than three characters.

We have published a few more new features for Budget – all focused around improving the usability of the Budget overview. Check it out or continue reading to find out more.

Search

We have added a simple search to the Budget overview which should make it easier to find the expense you’re after especially now that we’ve increased the number of budget items to 100. Once you enter three characters in the search, the Budget overview will start filtering.

Toggle paid

We have added a toggle to allow you to show and hide paid budget items. This is particularly useful near the end of the month when you want to see the last few remaining expenses. No more searching, just click the button and we hide all the budget items you have marked as paid.

Multiple “new” buttons

We have split the “New Budget Item” button and there are now three – “New Expense”, “New Income” and when conditions are met, “New Saving”. The forms for each have been slightly reduced as we have been able to remove any fields not necessary to the budget item type.

On the way

We have several features in the works and in the next version we are hoping to add support for batch actions. You will be able to mark multiple expenses as paid, no more needing to go into each one.

We have published a few new features for the Budget App which are now available – check it out or continue reading to see what we’ve changed.

Increased limit

We use Budget ourselves and our mantra is that if it isn’t suitable for our needs, then it isn’t likely to be suitable for anyone else. We received feedback concerning the limit and got close to hitting it ourselves. We don’t want to think about reaching the limit again so we’ve increased the limit to one hundred budget items.

Account identifiers

If you track multiple accounts, there is an important piece of information missing from the Budget overview – the account an expense relates to. Space is at a premium on the Budget Overview; we can’t add the name of the account in addition to everything else as it will end up looking too busy. To solve this, we now allow you to set a colour for each account. Each expense will now include a small icon in the relevant colour so you can identity the account related to the expense.

Projections

We have made a couple of minor changes to the design of the projection sections – primarily for mobile users. This area of the Budget overview is very much work in progress and we are figuring out to use the extra space for tablet and desktop users.

Other changes

We have tweaked the expense bars to show a larger differentiation for smaller value expenses. Under £5 will now display differently to under £25.

We have made a couple of minor content changes and update the included env.example file for any developers who may want to host their own version of Budget.

On the way

We have several features in the works, feedback has been incredible and by using it ourselves, we are able to see where the usability falls down.

• We are going to add a search to the Budget overview
• We are going to add a “transfer” option – more on this soon.
• We are going to add the ability to act on multiple budget items at once. Again, more on this soon.

We have released an update to Budget which includes the first batch of changes raised by our beta users.

Please review the below and let us know if there is anything we have missed. Our goal is to make Budget as easy to use as possible and all the lessons we learn with Budget will make Budget Pro better.

Locked in the demo

Users who opted to load the demo felt locked in once the demo had loaded; there was no obvious way to return to the beginning and create your own Budget. Our thought process was based around the user “adopting” the demo and using it as the starting point for their own Budget. We have added a button which always shows next to “Adopt” which takes the user to the reset page so they can reset their App and start afresh.

Currencies

We had added four more currencies to the App – Candian, Australian and New Zealand Dollar and the India Rupee. We will add additional currencies upon request – just let us know if there are currencies you’d like included.

Hello fellow developers!

The Budget App is open source. We reviewed the README and have updated the installation instructions to ease setup and we have added some helpful values into the .env.example file.

You can set up your own instance of Budget or even submit suggestions via GitHub. All contributions welcome and very much appreciated.

With the impending releases we are making the API more testable and improving the first-install process.

Added

• We have started transferring our Postman response tests to local feature tests.
• We have added tests for the Authentication controller.
• We have started writing tests for the ResourceTypeManage controller.
• We have updated /auth/forgot-password and /auth/register, both now support a send GET parameter, if defined, no email will be issued.

Changed

• We are tweaking the first install; we have squashed all the migrations and tweaked the Docker setup. We have added an initial-install.sql file, this includes the required data for the API.
• We have made minor changes to how we return validation errors; we were calling exit and stalling our tests.
• We have updated the responses for /auth/forgot-password and /auth/register; responses include the required follow-on URIs and parameters.
• We have updated the README, we have added a Tests section and updated the setup steps.