[HN Gopher] Show HN: BudgetFlow - Budget planning using interact...
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Show HN: BudgetFlow - Budget planning using interactive Sankey
diagrams
Author : mkrd
Score : 181 points
Date : 2024-08-07 11:56 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.budgetflow.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.budgetflow.cc)
| techplex wrote:
| This is a neat view into budgeting. What are your future plans?
| Will you have tools that help see how the different pockets grow
| over time?
| mkrd wrote:
| Hey, thanks! I have a lot of ideas, one of them is to actually
| have a scrollable timeline so you can see how your budget
| develops over the years. Also I am thinking about adding things
| like planned future expenses, and a retirement calculator.
|
| Sadly I don't have enough time next to my day job, so progress
| is slow. I am hoping that it might gain some popularity, so I
| can maybe start allocating more time to this project!
| jonplackett wrote:
| I love this idea! I was vaguely thinking of making something like
| this for myself but I'm very glad someone else has done the hard
| work. Getting started now!
| mkrd wrote:
| Thanks! Really encouraging to see people liking it :)
| egberts1 wrote:
| I use Sankey (in Python) to plot out multiple retirement pathways
| with ramification on various taxes and draindown of funds
| especially if you can display three or more variants side-by-side
| (or in my case, stacked viewers).
|
| It is a great graphing tool!!!
| gresrun wrote:
| You should check out Projection Lab[0]! Not affiliated; just a
| happy customer!
|
| [0]: https://projectionlab.com/
| monkeydust wrote:
| Nice use of Sankey. Here's an ask or thought, I would like to
| feed this automatically with my spend data from my bank account.
| So I can export a csv that has time-date, entity, amount
| (credit/debit) - would be great if it could spit this out by
| category (where perhaps an llm could help with this task). I
| would then like flow to be automated monthly or perhaps quarterly
| with major deltas (per my definition) then pushed to me via
| alerts. So this isn't so much active budget management but
| passive nudging where the shape of my spend changes something I
| don't look at now but would like to.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If you have a CSV and are happy using LLM, then you should ask
| an LLM to give you python code to generate a sankey plot. It's
| not difficult to wrangle.
| westurner wrote:
| The Plaid API JSON includes inferred transaction categories.
|
| OFX is one alternative to CSV for transaction data.
|
| ofparse parses OFX: https://pypi.org/project/ofxparse/
|
| W3C ILP Interledger protocol is for inter-ledger data for
| traditional and digital ledgers. ILP also has a message spec
| for transactions.
| shireboy wrote:
| I love Sankey diagrams and don't understand why major personal
| finance apps like Mint, Quicken, etc., (and corporate ERPs for
| that matter) don't provide them out of the box. I plan to try
| this out for a budget, but want to see my actual expenses this
| way as well.
| davidstoker wrote:
| Sounds like you would benefit from Monarch. I use their Sankey
| features for visualizing expenses
| (https://www.monarchmoney.com/features/spending)
| enobrev wrote:
| I'm also a fan of monarch. Thanks for this; I didn't realize
| they had it. I wish I could have more control over the
| feature, but it's nice to see it there.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I'd guess because the PMs on those products are pretty sure
| (and I agree with them) that adding a Sankey diagram will
| generate ZERO additional sales, so even one day of work to
| implement it isn't worth it, especially given the ensuing
| lifetime of maintenance on the feature.
|
| Speaking just for myself, I've looked at personal finance
| Sankey diagrams on Reddit many times and never understood what
| use they were to anyone, what actionable insights were provided
| that you didn't already get some other way.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > [...] and never understood what use they were to anyone.
|
| Different people consume data in different ways. For some,
| data is easier to understand when arranged in tables, black
| on white, as they can skim through a lot of datasets quite
| easily.
|
| Others benefit by a colorful, graphical representation, which
| Sankey provides.
|
| From my experience in consumer facing applications, I'd
| assume that a colorful, flashy, nice-looking Sankey could
| boost sales. People prefer things that look nice.
| shireboy wrote:
| Well, I'm considering purchasing Monarch because of this
| feature, so not sure that's true. I am a visual learner, but
| the reason I like them is they help me at a glance see the
| flow of money through multiple categories. Some systems
| represent this as pie charts you drill down on, but a Sankey
| shows it all at once glance. As far as actionable insight,
| they help decide areas that would be most beneficial to
| reduce expenses or increase revenue.
| calrain wrote:
| Where does the data get stored?
|
| Why is there no company / legal entity / contact information on
| the home page?
|
| It's an interesting idea, but if you want budget information
| about people, you need to excel at being above board.
| mkrd wrote:
| Good point, I get your concerns. I just got the page out there,
| so it is super new, but I will add the relevant info as soon as
| possible.
|
| The data is stored in a database that is on the server which
| serves the page!
| ttul wrote:
| You need a random number generator called "Having Kids" and
| another one labeled "Divorce". This would complete the
| simulation.
|
| /s
| ttul wrote:
| More seriously, though, budgeting models benefit from the
| ability to express a random variable at each input so that you
| can graph the possible range of outcomes.
| causal wrote:
| Yeah this is where most budgeting tools fail me. These tools
| often provide super detailed categories that the user just
| has to make educated guesses about- and the onus is then on
| the user to abide by their guesswork. Not to mention how
| these tools pretend that expenses all happen in neat
| monthly/yearly cycles.
|
| Budgets are useful for savings goals, but it's difficult to
| plan day-to-day spending beyond very high-level categories.
|
| I personally find retrospective diagrams more useful - a
| breakdown of what my actual expenses were so that I can
| update my mental model and find subscriptions (or habits) to
| eliminate.
| dugmartin wrote:
| The way we've (my wife and I) have been budgeting for years
| is to have a set of fixed monthly expenses, mostly
| recurring but some one time, and then have a pot of money
| for variable daily expenses. We then divide that into the
| number of days of the month and think of this as our "daily
| allowance" and we try to stay under it to stay within our
| monthly budget. Some days are over, some are under but if
| you recalculate it every day it is an easy way to stay on
| track with the bonus that sometimes you have a lot of money
| you can spend at the end of the month. We still categorize
| the expenses but it is more for looking backwards.
|
| I've thought of making an app using this methodology but
| personal finance apps are like project management apps -
| everybody has their own opinion on how they should work. I
| do this with a Google Doc spreadsheet per year with tabs
| per month which is not ideal but works well enough.
| dewey wrote:
| Clicking on the settings icon shows a "Not Found" error.
| mkrd wrote:
| Hey! That's because the budget on the landing page is not
| really stored in the DB. Haven't found a better way to do it
| yet. But if you login, it will work on your budgets!
| dewey wrote:
| You could just hide the button if the user isn't logged in to
| not confuse people.
| surfincoder wrote:
| hey man. This is dope. Do you have an email I could reach out to?
| Im working on something in this space & would love to collaborate
| on something with you.
| mtam wrote:
| Wanted to drop a note that I have been using Sankey for the exact
| same use case for a couple years now. I use Google Charts and
| about 40 lines of JS code, then I export the SVG (or paste a
| screenshot) into my presentation slides. It is a bit tedious and
| error prone process but works great. There are a few bugs on
| Google Charts Sankey implementation as well that makes so that
| the order you enter items impact the visualization layout.
|
| In my case, we do project level budget and it has to flow
| upstream so I need to ensure that the numbers add up. From my
| preliminary test, it does not look like I can do that with this
| tool (yet?). I want to enter the leaf / most granular level
| numbers and then do the group hierarchy and not have to enter
| every number from top to bottom.
| artur_makly wrote:
| found a free google sheets (local) add-on for this too:
| https://github.com/brucemcpherson/SankeySnip?tab=readme-ov-f...
| BigParm wrote:
| Nice use of that diagram type I love it
| shagie wrote:
| One of the things that irks me with many of the
| /r/dataisbeautiful things with Sankey diagrams is somewhere on
| the line there's "one big bucket" that loses all of the data
| behind it.
|
| In my own budgeting, my direct deposit can go to multiple
| accounts - and I do. Part goes to my "allowance" account and part
| goes to my "savings" account. Other people have alimony, child
| support, or similar withholdings from their wages.
|
| So the question I have for the example budget on the page, can
| you have the freelance work go directly to savings? Or 300 be
| taken out of salary and go to child support without hitting the
| main account? If you have two incomes in a household and the
| breakdown is "two personal accounts and one shared account - each
| person contributes 10% to their own and 10% to the other person's
| personal account, and 80% to the shared account," can that be
| shown that way rather than one "main" account?
| globular-toast wrote:
| How does it "lose all of the data behind it"? It's right there
| on the left hand side. Money is fungible so when it comes to
| budgeting it doesn't matter where it comes from. I don't really
| see the point of adding obligations/liabilities like taxes and
| child support to it. The point of a budget is it's your choice
| how you allocate it so why add stuff that isn't your choice?
|
| When you say freelance goes directly to savings, are you saying
| you want something like "no matter what I earn from freelance
| it goes to savings"?
| shagie wrote:
| > When you say freelance goes directly to savings, are you
| saying you want something like "no matter what I earn from
| freelance it goes to savings"?
|
| Yes. Or another account so that you have clear accounting for
| tax purposes. "This account gets freelance money and this
| money was spent for home office expenses related to the
| freelance work which is deductible from that income stream."
|
| Child support obligations come out of one income as a
| percentage of that income - but not the other. A two income
| family where the husband is paying 10% of wages to child
| support for example - its 10% of his $1000 / month that never
| hits the main account, but her $500 /month is untouched and
| goes to the shared account. This could be complicated if she
| was a 1099 worker and needed to keep track of that money
| separately so that it could have the proper taxes taken out
| of that and have the resulting "actual money" that is
| spendable go into the "can be spent" bucket.
|
| While money is fungible, the depiction of money flows when it
| hits a "one big bucket" makes it so that the value behind the
| Sankey diagram is lost. Is all the money that your household
| makes taxed the same way? Do you file jointly or separately?
| Is there a separate account for isolating certain expenses
| for reporting purposes?
|
| https://alternativeenergyatunc.wordpress.com/wp-
| content/uplo... is useful and one will note the lack of a big
| bucket. Or consider the original one - https://upload.wikimed
| ia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/JIE_Sank...
|
| There is information lost when it goes to one big bucket.
| nightski wrote:
| Accounts are meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I
| personally have dozens and they don't really align with how
| I want to utilize the money when I am using them optimally
| from a financial perspective. It's better to think in terms
| of envelops/buckets IMHO, which the Sankey absolutely does.
| That's the right side of the equation.
| oxw wrote:
| Budget and finance tools as a class operate under the idea that
| money is fungible. One of those differences between how
| economists believe people operate vs how they really do
|
| The people I know who could benefit most from budgeting do not
| think of money as fungible. They mentally allocate different
| incomes to different spending categories
|
| This seems like an opportunity for a tool to break the mold and
| offer a solution that fits how people feel about money vs how
| they "should"
| cdchn wrote:
| Money is fungible. That is what makes it money. You're just
| thinking of different ways to allocate it.
| shagie wrote:
| A dollar in an account is fungible. Are all the dollars that
| show up on the W2 going to the same account? Do some of them
| not even hit the main account?
|
| If I made $3000 this month and $300 of that went to a
| retirement account and $1000 of that went to tax withholdings
| and another $300 went to child support, and of the remaining
| $1400, I had direct deposit put $1000 in savings and $400 in
| allowance... how would that be represented?
|
| I contend that for this (these numbers are purely made up for
| ease of talking about): (income 1)
| $3000 -> $300 child support -> $300 company
| retirement plan -> $1000 tax withholdings
| -> $300 allowance -> {various 'fun' expenses}
| -> $1100 savings -> {various 'not fun' expenses}
| (income 2) $2000 -> $700 tax withholdings
| -> $200 allowance -> {various 'fun' expenses}
| -> $1100 savings -> {various 'not fun' expenses}
|
| The 'allowance' and 'savings' are each one bucket that have a
| net $500 and $2200 coming in to them respectively.
|
| Having $2000 and $3000 go into one big bucket of a 'main'
| account, while working under the 'all money is fungible'
| fails to capture some reality of how money flows. For
| example, if income 1 loses their job, child support goes to
| $0 (not $300 from income 2) as does the $300 for retirement
| and the $1000 for tax withholdings.
| jamilton wrote:
| Might it be more effective to try to get such people to think
| of money as fungible?
| mkrd wrote:
| This works better on desktop, if you hover with your mouse over
| a flow that you can see the individual parts it is made up from
| and you can click on each one to see and edit it.
|
| Also, you can configure the flows completely freely, so each
| case you mention will work easily!
| cbhl wrote:
| I've been using YNAB for the last ten years or so and I've
| found the best way of dealing with these sorts of cases is to
| exclude that money from "the budget" altogether (off-budget
| bank account, simply not linking them, or putting them in a
| separate "budget").
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| With Sankey graphs you can just "skip" one stage. So in your
| example you could go from "income 1" directly to "expense 1"
| without first going to the budget. Most people don't do this
| though, because most people just have all their income go to
| one bank account, which is the "big bucket" that all the money
| goes through.
|
| You can see an example I quickly created for this here:
| https://sankeymatic.com/build/?i=OoQw5gpgzgBA2gFgKwAYC6MAqIA...
| shagie wrote:
| That's a better visualization than most people present.
|
| An example of one that disappoints is https://www.reddit.com/
| r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15f01pb/oc... where that one big
| bucket of 'total applications' loses a lot of data. Was
| everything from Dice ghosted? That would be useful
| information. I would contend that there's no value in the
| 'total applications' bucket in there at all other than to sum
| up the leftmost column - which can be done separately.
|
| One big bucket isn't necessarily wrong, but if one is trying
| to show off the features of the Sankey diagram, showing it
| with the stronger representations that it is capable of doing
| can be useful.
|
| Having seen countless poorly done ones with an everything
| bucket in the middle that squashes valuable relationships
| between the inputs and outputs... and that's a turn off for
| me when they are presented that way.
| wongarsu wrote:
| This is so much better. For me the raison d'etre of Sankey
| diagrams is to show the dependencies in money flows.
|
| For example if I earn $500 from freelance work, but spend
| $200 on marketing and $400 on transport to do that, then a
| Sankey diagram like the one on the front page where
| everything gets intermingled in a main account and expenses
| get deducted at the end make it seem like this freelance work
| is a good thing and I should probably do more. In a good
| Sankey diagram I would immedately deduct the expenses from
| the freelance work, and see that instead of freelance income
| reaching my budget I'm actually subsidizing freelance work
| from my salary income.
|
| Similarly in your example it's immediately obvious that if
| the wage would vanish a lot of the taxes would also vanish
| mkrd wrote:
| That makes so much sense, thanks! I will update the example
| accordingly. But this shows that some knowledge is needed
| to make good use of Sankey diagrams. I should add some
| tutorial pages with examples to make it easier to get
| started
| jftuga wrote:
| Thank you for including a relatively straightforward Privacy
| Policy:
|
| https://www.budgetflow.cc/privacy_policy
|
| and ToS:
|
| https://www.budgetflow.cc/terms_of_service
| mkrd wrote:
| No problem! And thanks to everyone who advised me to add them
| quickly
| b800h wrote:
| I'm not sure the diagram helps in any way, certainly in the use
| case on the main page.
|
| The "main account" is just thrown in to provide some sort of
| intermediate step. In most people's cases, it's just about income
| and outgoings.
| globalise83 wrote:
| I believe that this flow diagram would be greatly enhanced by
| having a "balance" type of node where you could see the balance
| at start, balance at end, net increase (decrease) within the
| popover (obviously the flow in - flow out should = the net
| increase). Would obviously make sense for bank account, and
| same for savings account nodes.
| itomato wrote:
| I seriously want this for ERP
| boilerupnc wrote:
| Enterprise tools using Sankey exist. I'm familiar with Apptio's
| TrueCost Explorer [0] as one example that can pull in budget
| input from ERP and Cloud.
|
| [0] https://www.apptio.com/products/cloudability/true-cost-
| explo...
|
| * Disclosure - I work for IBM
| thomascountz wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. I've never seen Sankey diagrams used for
| budgeting, but it feels very intuitive!
|
| I'm wondering about how budgeting tools like this help with
| planning vs budget auditing? Or maybe what I'm thinking of has a
| different name?
|
| When I think of budget planning, I'd like a tool to tell me what
| would happen to Y if I did X (e.g. how would buying a car today
| [purchase plus recurring costs] effect my maximum home down
| payment in 12 months)? Or if I want A, what can do to B, C, and D
| to make it happen (e.g. if I want to save for a trip to New
| Zealand next year, how could adjust my budget to reach my goal)?
|
| I'm not sure if what I'm describing is planning or not, but I can
| imagine visualizations helping with it!
| parsadotsh wrote:
| Looks very nice, but animations are very laggy for me (M1 Mac,
| Chrome Beta)
| bojo wrote:
| This is pretty cool. I manually put my budget for a month into a
| sankey generator just to see last year. Nice to see someone run
| that idea a little further.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| It's nice,would there be a way to combine monthly, weekly etc.
| based on the logic of the cost.
| fouc wrote:
| Strange, chart doesn't load in Safari 15.6, no error message in
| console.
| txutxu wrote:
| It's wrong. 3500 in -> go to parents house ->
| 1000 into bitcoin -> 100
| into speculative coins on bull market, or making sorts in bear
| markets -> 300 into gold
| -> 600 to stocks with dividend growth
| -> 400 to real state or REITs
| -> 200 to speculative stocks
| -> 500 to your bank account (with some interest)
| -> 200 to cash, for those days you go out of your parents home
| -> 200 to presents for your parents
|
| If your parents complain, give them the money of the presents,
| part from the bank account or from the speculative stuff, to
| silence them.
|
| Repeat and reinvest benefits into non correlative actives.
|
| Once you reach a balance of ((90 years - your age) x 12 months) *
| (3500 * N), maybe you can leave your parents home (not
| mandatory), and try to race with your yearly benefices, against
| the *real* inflation. N is a magic number, to cover the compound
| inflation during all those years, without penalizing too much the
| first years.
|
| Maybe next year 3500/month is still ok, but in 30 years it won't.
|
| If you're over 70's, do not follow this advice, take the 3500 and
| live la vida loca each month. Like in the "latin" song from the
| country that did never ever speak "latin".
|
| Have a nice day.
|
| Now seriously: The real important stuff when working with
| budgets, is to "see" the "estimate Vs real" thing.
| mkrd wrote:
| Yes, seeing the estimate vs the real thing will depend on how
| you set up your accounts. I have separate accounts for separate
| concerns, and automatically transfer the budgeted amounts, so I
| can see at the end of the month if my estimates are correct, or
| if I need to change them. But if you only have one bank account
| for everything, this will become harder
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Looks like some useless fancy-looking stuff for managers.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Very pretty! One thing I noticed is that when you hover over a
| budget item, it highlights the source and the destination of that
| item, but only a distance of one away. I think it would be useful
| to highlight items all the way to the root and leaves, so you can
| see where the money is actually coming from and going to. For
| example, if I hover over "Retirement Savings", it only highlights
| the "Savings" item. But I want to see where that money is
| eventually coming from: from the Main Account, which is fed by
| Freelance and Salary!
| jonplackett wrote:
| Is there a way to see how the money changes over time or do I
| need to work that out myself. Like if a bucket is filling up
| month by month?
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