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Money Foresight: reminder review?

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srickaby

26 May, 2016 10:39 AM

I have recently switched to Moneydance and am very happy with it, possibly even delighted.

I also find the cashflow forecast in Money Foresight very useful. However, I cannot make sense of the information displayed in Money Foresight's 'reminder review'. Can someone explain what it is supposed to show? I've searched here but cannot find a discussion of this feature.

1. 1 Posted by Kevin Stembridg... on 27 May, 2016 12:40 PM

   

   Hi Porky,

   I'm the developer of Money Foresight. The Reminder Review feature is a look back at what you expected to spend (based on your reminders) compared with what you actually spent.

   The Chart view shows 2 plots: Actual and Reminders. Where the Actual plot is higher than the Reminders plot, that's where you've overspent. The table view displays the totals for the review period broken down by category.

   There are still a lot of things I need to do to make it more useful. Mainly around drilling down to find out what is causing any overspending. In the meantime, feel free to play around with it and I'd be happy to hear if you have any suggestions.

   Cheers,
   Kevin

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2. 2 Posted by srickaby on 27 May, 2016 05:20 PM

   

   Hi Kevin

   Thanks for response and explanation.

   I see where you're going with this, I think. But the reminder review plot doesn't work from any category budgets set (?), even though it allows categories to be added to the plot. The concept of 'overspent' therefore assumes (if I've understood correctly) that the only planned spends will be those defined by reminders.

   Fair enough, but this is not how I'm using MD: I've used reminders to model direct debits. This makes Money Foresight's cashflow forecast incredibly useful. I'm not so sure about the reminder review plot though. Maybe the issue is just its name?

   If I've completely misunderstood this, please let me know - or just ignore this.

   For that matter, I'm not sure that MD's method of setting specific budget amounts by category is that helpful, although I know this is what most personal financial packages do. Categories and budgets (or a budget) are intrinsically different things.

   Many years ago I wrote some personal finance software that took a different, less technical approach. It started from the premise that one had a predictable and regular income (so no use for freelancers!), and knew what one's non-negotiable outgoings (water, gas, rent, mortgage and so on) were on an annual basis. It allowed these to be entered, then added one twelfth of each amount to the end-of-month target balance, plus a defined 'float', plus any saving aspirations. It then used linear regression to calculate the planned target balance on any particular day, compared it to the existing balance and gave a + or - amount depending on how much the current balance was in relation to the planned balance. This allowed one to do predictions like 'It's now Friday - how much can I afford to spend before Monday and stay on plan'.

   I wrote this initially for myself although it was later commercialized on a small scale. I didn't develop it any further because I myself went freelance, rendering this approach more or less useless ;-)

   Steve

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3. 3 Posted by Kevin Stembridg... on 27 May, 2016 05:57 PM

   

   Hi Steve,

   You've got an interesting backstory :)

   You're correct that the reminder review doesn't have any knowledge about budgets that are set up in MD. The reason is that budget items are not associated with Accounts and therefore I can't forecast Account balances based on them.

   Another of the main enhancements needed in the reminder review is the ability to filter out transactions that you don't want to be taken into account. You may have a one-off expense that you want to ignore for the purposes of determining if you're overspending or not. Or you may want to ignore whole categories for which you have no reminders set up.

   The name does seem a bit odd I guess. I created this feature because I found that the accuracy of the forecast was only as good as the accuracy of the reminders that were set up. And therefore I needed a way to review how the reminders compared against actual spending. Of course, it can just as easily be the spending that needs to be altered rather than the reminder.

   Thanks for the feedback,
   Kevin

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4. 4 Posted by srickaby on 27 May, 2016 06:32 PM

   

   Hi Kevin

   I was a software engineer for a long time - although after the personal finance software thing. To give you an idea of how long ago it was, the app - or 'program' as we called them in those days ;-) - started life on a Texas TI59 programmable calculator, then moved to a Sharp PC1500 (a gem in its day), and ended up on Psion Organisers. In its final version it even had transaction rollback.

   Re. your reply:

   Para 1; Yes, of course.

   Para 2: I agree.

   Para 3: Yes, true.

   I'll work with this for a bit and pass any other ideas I have to you. Meanwhile, the cashflow graph is a terrific feature, and does just about everything I need, so thanks for developing MF.

   Best wishes

   Steve

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5. System closed this discussion on 02 Oct, 2016 02:36 AM.