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Show HN: Budget Kanban – Visually manage finances in Kanban boards
Hi HN!
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
- chenshuiluke 3y agoI signed up expecting to be able to at least give it a try for free but I was almost immediately shown a subscription plan change. Is there a way to delete my account?
- JustroX 3y agoHi. I can delete your account :D. Send me the details in the feedback widget located at the lower right corner. Thanks!
- calvinmorrison 3y agodoes anyone like YNAB or etc? I use a spreadsheet still and what I like about my setup is it not only projects cash over time by including known expenses and incomes over time, but adjustments so I can actively reconcile it as I move forward through time. YNAB and other tools dont seem to help me there.
- selykg 3y agoI use a combination of YNAB and a spreadsheet. Generally YNAB is my day-to-day and tracks my actual savings, income and spending. The spreadsheet is more for historical purposes and creating graphs or tables for monitoring long term goals (like retirement). I can always goto YNAB and see my budget, but my spreadsheet shows me the bigger picture. I swear by YNAB, it might be costly but it saves me way more money than it costs so I consider it worth it.
- weakfish 3y agoI love YNAB. I think the problem may be that YNAB’s philosophy explicitly discourages projecting future income aka cash not currently on hand, and so it may just not fit your case.
- pammf 3y agoThis is pretty useful IMO, discourages me from spending now money that I'll only have in two weeks.
- visch 3y agoYNAB user here as well. Could you define exactly what you mean by > 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
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
- TiredGuy 3y agoI like how this uses something familiar (Kanban) in a novel way to address the real-time tracking of a budget. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JustroX 3y agoThanks TiredGuy! Automated card is my exact next feature :D. Because I'll be using it to track my subscriptions. I'm actually super close to including it in my mvp, but decided to cut it so I could launch sooner. Thanks for the feedback!
- visch 3y agoCan you show a realistic example where folks have 20-50 items they are budgeting for monthly? I can't imagine it working for that kind of use case so I moved on
- fghafoor 3y agoJust bought to test but after payment goes back to a broken link ( goes to .app domain instead of .com )
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoI don't understand the problem this solves. It appears this is for a business to track project expenses? Don't businesses use actual accounting software to track expenses, etc.? How does this reflect or compete with that? I don't think this makes any sense for personal finance.
- throwaway11460 3y agoActual accounting software doesn't care about projects. You get a $10k invoice - now the question is what projects is it related to, what amounts...
- sdf4j 3y agothat’s not true. Serious accounting software let you assign an invoice to a project, program, cost center, groups… you can even do that on at the invoice item level.
- ska 3y agoActual accounting software is double entry. You’ll move that invoice through AP, and the balancing transactions will be split by project/type/etc by a combination of accounts and perhaps labels/tags.
- steve1977 3y agoActual accounting software can certainly care about that. This is called operational or cost accounting (vs financial accounting, which would be accounts payable etc.)
- datavirtue 3y agoMy guess is that they were trying to address the collaboration aspect of budgeting. It is usually a fairly large group planning effort where the budget starts out looking a certain way and is iterated on rather quickly (hopefully, and herein lies the problem) as input is reconciled and ideas are explored. 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.
- vslira 3y agoLoved the idea! Admit I should use for a while because it's unclear if it's really ergonomic, but overall super interesting. Congratulations on the launch!
- JustroX 3y agoThanks vslira!
- linuxdude314 3y agoThis looks like way more work than just using a spreadsheet. 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.
- cjk2 3y agoYeah this. After futzing with Excel for over a decade, I switched to GNUcash and the budgeting didn't work, then two other commercial products which didn't work, then I tried to design a product which would solve the problem and that didn't work either. So here I am back on a spreadsheet. 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.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoDo you have a template you could recommend? I have really tried to fit my records into spreadsheets and I just never seem to get something working for some reason. I think my brain is just not wired up for spreadsheets.
- cjk2 3y agoFairly simple. One sheet per pay cycle / month labelled accordingly. One column for Transaction name, one for each account. I have two bank accounts and a credit card. First row is the summary header which contains the sum of each column (balance), The second row is the column titles, the third row is the starting balance for each of the accounts at the date that the period starts. All transactions are listed one per row. Name the transaction "shopping" and put the amount as a negative value in the relevant account column. If you are given money it's a positive amount instead. If you transfer money between accounts you put a minus in one column and a positive in the other one. All reconciled transactions are marked with green background. All waiting for reconciliation transactions (just spent the money) are marked with a yellow background. All budgeted items are added as rows at the start of the period as formulas so for example in my case `"food", "=-350"`. If I spend something on food, say `"corner shop", "-8.90"` and this value lands in cell B16, then the food budget item is changed to `"food", "=-350-B16"`. This reduces the food budget. The column sum balance doesn't change. Been using this for about 5 years now. It's currently residing in Apple Numbers because I'm too cheap to pay for Excel and I have an iPad and it works entirely offline so I can use it when travelling to keep an eye on spending. Once you have regular budget items identified keep a "template" sheet and just duplicate that at the start of the period/month or whenever. Mine has: approx salary, rent, taxes, internet, mobile phone, subscriptions, food, energy and travel budgets on it.
- itronitron 3y agoI'd rather install software than 'sign up' to use something hosted elsewhere, especially for anything involving private information especially finances.
- qwertox 3y agoI agree. If they are getting hacked in two-three years, hackers will know who they really want to target. 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".
- datavirtue 3y agoSeeing this just reminds me of how all software is ephemeral these days. It used to be that you would buy something like this for $20 at EggHead or MicroCenter and use it for the next thirty years without paying another dime. Useful. Now everything is cloud-subscription based. You play the good customer, pay for years, and then it closes down and you have nothing to show for it. Garbage. Excuse me while I slink back to my spreadsheet.
- rco8786 3y agoCould you let me know who did the demo video? Looks great.
- JustroX 3y agoI did :D I used screen.studio
- thatha7777 3y agoI found the "Sign up for free" option too misleading for my preferences: it leads you to create a project, which immediately leads to a payment page. I guess I did "sign up for free", but I'm not sure what signing up got me. Kudos on getting my email —— I hope I don't get any marketing materials I didn't consent to.
- JustroX 3y agoUnderstood, the message can be confusing, so I'll take it down. Originally, it was meant for individuals invited to a board by someone else, allowing them to sign up without creating a board. If it's causing confusion, I'll make sure to clarify it. 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.
- thatha7777 2y agoI just wanted to acknowledge how wholesome your answer was, and thank you for it. (Hopefully you get acquired sometime soon, and then "you"'ll be sending marketing materials :P -- like it or not.)
- layer8 3y agoThe name suggests a low-cost kanban solution, not a kanban solution for budgeting.
- mNovak 3y agoActually I could see this being very popular for wedding planning; something inherently collaborative, with clear categories, that people are actively trying to budget to a specific number. I mean yes, numerous spreadsheet templates exist for this, but you're basically selling a pleasant interface (it does look great!). I have a harder time imagining this for business use cases, unless maybe you really focus on the approval/reimbursement flows.
- JustroX 3y agoThanks for the input mNovak! That's a great perspective :D. I'll definitely consider it :D
- kkfx 3y agoWell... Nice UI but... I track my finances with org-mode and Beancount/Fava for UI and well it's far more clear for me, not only because the current state of things but because the "new views" I can easily make. 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...
- JustroX 3y agoHappy for you to find the tool that works for you :)
- kkfx 3y agoIt's not a critic to Budget Kanban devs, it's a critic to modern UIs and to single-entry bookkeeping in general. 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.
- MissTake 3y agoStarts at $5 a month with no free option or trial? No thanks.
- lenerdenator 3y agoThat's not particularly out-of-line for budgeting software, at least if it keeps your data private. 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?
- DLarsen 3y agoI like the creativity of the new form factor. 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.
- JustroX 3y agoThat's a good way to teach kid the psychology of finances. Good luck Dlarsen! Keep innovating :D
- 3y ago