haondt[blog]

In my previous post, I introduced Midas, a budgeting tool I designed since I couldn't find any other that matches my exact budgeting style. At the time of the post, I had "finished" the project in that it was in a somewhat usable state. After using it for all of maybe 10 minutes, I found myself with a list of bugs, improvements and changes I wanted to make. After fixing it, I'd find more things I wanted to improve. This repeated for about 3 weeks before tapering off, so I thought I'd write this post to showcase those changes.

I'll skip over the bugfixes and minor tweaks, focusing instead on the interesting bits.

Supercategories

I initially built Midas with two options for indexing transactions - Categories and Tags. Transactions required exactly one of the former and could have zero or more of the latter. This way you have both an opt-in and a required way of sorting them. The issue was that when it comes to reports, I need to know where every cent is going, so I only really looked at categories.

Categories are a good way to see where the money is going every month - how much is spent on groceries, on rent, on toys etc. But at the same time, I also needed to know flat-out how much is going to needs, and how much is going to wants. So I decided to add a second level of categorization: Supercategories.

Every category belongs to exactly one supercategory, and the report has metrics partitioned by category, and by supercategory.

Split & Merge

Midas already has a "reconcile" feature that will automatically combine transactions. Given a transaction of x$ from account 1 to account 2, and another transaction of x$ from account 2 to account 3, we can safely combine both transactions into a single transaction of x$ from account 1 to account 3, without changing any balances.

I found out in some cases, when I make two transfers in quick succession between certain banks, one bank reports one transfer of x$ and one transfer of y$, while the other bank reports a single transfer of (x + y)$. The reconcile tool can't handle this (and I have no interest in trying to support it), so I instead added a way to manually "force" merge 2 or more transactions.

Equivalently, I have a few use cases for splitting a transaction into many:

• You could imagine in the above scenario I could have instead split the (x + y)$ transfer into two transactions, then let the reconcile merge them together
• Splitting a purchase at the supermarket into groceries and some "fun spending" done at the same time
• Un-merging a merged or reconciled transaction

So I added a split feature as well.

Click to View

In many sections of the report, I would have a table row for a certain grouping of transactions, along with a metric. "Cash flow per account", "Spending per category", etc.

If I saw this and wanted to drill down (e.g. "what exactly was I buying in this category?"), I would have to go to the transaction search and manually set up some filters to find the transactions corresponding with that table row. So instead I hyperlinked basically everything so that you can click on the grouping and it will pop up a list of all the transactions that are contributing to it.

Report updates

On the subject of the report, I also made some changes there. Previously I had a section for a table of the spending per category, and a bar chart for the spending per supercategory. I like the bar chart because it conveys the information visually, but I need the table so I can hyperlink it to the transaction list modal. So I wanted both for the categories and the supercategories. On top of this, I also wanted a chart showing the spending for each as a percentage of total spending and of total income. This is 8 total charts to add to the report, which was starting to make things feel a little sprawley.

I needed a way to group them together. Essentially I wanted tabs, so I could have a single section dedicated to categories for example, and the tabs would map to all the different ways of breaking it down. I played around with a bunch of different Bulma elements until I found something I liked.

Embedded Node-RED Editor

Despite being the smallest change here, this is by far my favorite. I simply added a page that contains an iframe pointing at the Node-RED editor. The convenience here is huge. Often I want to open the flows in one Chrome window and have Midas open in another for debugging. Previously, I'd have to open a new tab, recall the url for the Node-RED instance, and type it in. Now I just middle-mouse-click the link in the menu and I'm there. I only need to bookmark a single url and the application feels more cohesive.

That about wraps it up for the changes I wanted to go over. Like I said before, there were some bugfixes as well, and other minor improvements. Despite all this, the todo list is much, much longer than it was before, so perhaps there will be another post. I mentioned in the previous post that I was considering reworking the persistence layer. I recently finished rebuilding another project, GSM. I took that rebuild as an opportunity to try out EF Core, and found it to be a really good fit. I think it would fit well in Midas too, as it would reduce the code a bit and provides a solution for db migration.