Associate buckets and accounts
Seb33
via web
Hi !
I have still a feature wich miss me in order to manage completely my accounts.
I have a checking account and two savings accounts, I create many buckets wich are related to this 3 accounts since we can't link a bucket to an account. Salary is paid into my checking account and every month I allocate income on every buckets. So my savings accounts increased, how do I know how much represents the sum of the buckets related of my savings account ? I don't want to take my calculator and add manually the green or red sum of buckets in order to find the total amount.
Thanks for your help.
Seb.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 05 Feb, 2010 02:14 PM
Seb: You shouldn't be creating more buckets just because you have multiple accounts. Your checking account (and usually a cash account) is what drives your cash flow.
The money you are saving from your checking should go through a Savings bucket but in these steps:
For getting bucket sums, MoneyWell 1.5 has some added functionality to help you with that.
3 Posted by Seb33 on 05 Feb, 2010 03:06 PM
Hi Kevin and thanks for your answer, but it's not what I need. In fact, my account savings regroups all buckets for expense at medium term for example tax, insurance, and checking account buckets for expense at short term like food, gasoil. My spending plan allocate all this buckets independently of the account.
I hope you understand why I want to know sum of buckets wich correspond to an account, else what should I do ?
I hope too my poor english isn't a barrier to understanding my issue.
Thanks.
Seb.
Support Staff 4 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 05 Feb, 2010 04:06 PM
Seb: Sorry, I'm really not clear about what you need.
All I'm saying is that buckets are meant to be used to collect money for expenses and some may need to hold that money for longer periods, like a year for property taxes. They are not to be used for holding your savings account balances, that's the job of the accounts and not the buckets.
MoneyWell 1.5 does let you see bucket sums for multiple bucket selections and this may be all that you're asking for.
5 Posted by Seb33 on 05 Feb, 2010 04:17 PM
Thanks Kevin to try to understand what I wrote. I follow the 1.5 beta and I don't see a feature wich allow sum of the red/green sums of many buckets. For example, if I have a bucket Food with 500$ and a bucket Insurance with 250$, I can't find the way to have the sum of 750$ in selecting the two buckets...
Seb.
Support Staff 6 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 05 Feb, 2010 04:19 PM
It's just not turned on yet. It will look like the panel that you see when you select multiple transactions.
7 Posted by Tamara on 05 Feb, 2010 05:03 PM
I think I understand. He wants to keep money that is in a bucket for an
expense that will be due down the road in a savings account. Like something
that would be due only once or a few times a year, taxes, insurance, etc.
The way I handle it is that I have one checking account and one savings
account at the same bank that I deem cash flow accounts. I keep most of the
money in savings and transfer to checking as needed to cover payments I
schedule. Other savings accounts are treated as actual savings.
Seb wants to total certain buckets and keep that amount in savings, since it
will not be needed soon, and keep the amount for other buckets in checking,
since those expenses will be paid sooner.
To do that to the exact amounts of money doesn't really fit the way
MoneyWell operates. Once the bucket totaling feature you describe for 1.5 is
implemented, then one option would be to total the long term expenses
buckets, and make sure that amount is in the savings account, and the
remainder is in the checking account. I'm not sure what Seb said about his
accounts, but I would think having a savings account dedicated to this type
of expense would be the easiest to track.
8 Posted by Lance on 05 Feb, 2010 05:35 PM
I've wished Moneywell had a better way to handle this as well.
The issue isn't that I want to treat my savings account as a spending/cash flow account, but rather I want a way to track what each portion of my savings account balance is intended for.
For example, I have annual bills like property tax and insurance. I also have general funds like "Vacation" and "Home Repairs". I contribute money to each of these goals every month by summing up all the desired monthly contribution amounts and I then allocate this amount into my "To Savings" bucket. I then transfer the balance of the To Savings bucket to my savings account.
The problem is that just looking at my savings account balance is not helpful. How do I know how much of the balance is for property tax? How do I know how much of it is safe to spend on Vacation? Essentially I need a way to track numerous "virtual" savings account within a single savings account.
Before I used MoneyWell, I tracked all of this in an Excel spreadsheet. When I first started using MoneyWell, I created a separate document to track my savings account balance and created a bucket for each goal. This isn't what MW is really intended for, but it worked.
Recently I significantly reduced the number of buckets I use for my normal cash flow so I've now combined my cash flow buckets with the buckets from my savings accounts. To visually divide these in the bucket list I created a "dummy" bucket named "----- SAVINGS BUCKETS -----" that sits between the two to divide them.
It would be nice if MW could better support this, but I'm not sure tying a bucket to an account really makes sense. I think a better solution would be for MW to support "virtual accounts" where I could take a physical account (such as savings) and have MW pretend it was composed of 10 little subaccounts. I could then transfer to each of these subaccounts. Physically & for reconciling the cash would all be in the same account, but at a glance MW could tell me what each portion of that balance was intended for.
Until we get a feature like that, the bucket sum view should at least help me double check that my "----- SAVINGS BUCKETS -----" add up to my actual savings account balance.
-Lance
Support Staff 9 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 06 Feb, 2010 03:20 PM
We have a couple of planned features that will make saving for wish list items and tracking movement of cash that should solve these issues. Thanks.
10 Posted by Timothy Cox on 06 Feb, 2010 05:13 PM
@Lance: My workaround is similar – I created a hidden account called “Savings Funds”. Every time I transfer funds from “Savings” to “Savings Funds,” I also make a parallel bucket transfer of the same amount, from an income bucket (Salary) to another income bucket called “Fund:Vacation” or “Fund:Car” or “Fund:Taxes” etc.
In this way, I end up with a number of Fund buckets whose values add up to the total in my hidden accounts (of which I actually have several). I have to manually confirm that the sums match.
When it comes time to reconcile my Savings account, I take the amount from the paper/online statement and subtract the amount of the hidden account and use this difference as the target balance to reconcile against.
In this way, when I hide hidden accounts, the stashed-away money seems to vanish and I can make my cash flow decisions based on the remaining unhidden balances.
This works, but I too wish that there were an easier way, such as Lance’s suggestion to create virtual subaccounts.
11 Posted by Seb33 on 08 Feb, 2010 06:58 AM
Thanks to Tamara and Lance. Tamara you explain exactly what I would said, and I understand there is no way to monitor my account savings with Moneywell. Kevin suggests to have an account savings with a total and that's all, no way to have detail of this total.
I understand too that 1.5 release will not bring a solution with this way of managing my accounts.
Seb.
12 Posted by Seb33 on 13 Feb, 2010 11:31 AM
I just discover the 1.5 release, and I'm glad to see that you add the feature which allows to select many buckets and to have immediately the sum of this buckets.
Very good job for the other many features of this release, thanks Kevin to be as attentive to the requests of Moneywell users.
Thanks a lot.
Seb.
Support Staff 13 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 13 Feb, 2010 03:51 PM
Thanks Seb.
14 Posted by jesse on 24 Jul, 2010 04:39 PM
I'm new to MW and I found this conversation very interesting.
It would be nice to see the amount that each account contributes to the income and expense buckets. Similar to what the Smart Buckets do with the number of transaction. When I click on my Checking account, I would like my bucket totals to change to indicate how much my checking account is contributing to the totals. When I select "All Accounts" I would see total amounts from all accounts.
Money flows from income to expense buckets are a good thing, but money flows first from accounts, so it would be nice to be able to see it reflected in the buckets.
Support Staff 15 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 26 Jul, 2010 10:06 PM
Jesse: MoneyWell does show you only those transactions that are associated with a selected account in each bucket. The bucket balances though can't change or it would be hard to properly manage your cash flow.
The only time the bucket balances change is when you have a graph filter active (a selected month) and then the color of the balance badges also change to show the sum for that month.
If you want to see a sum of a range of transactions in a bucket, simply select them and the detail panel to the right will give you that information.
16 Posted by jesse on 26 Jul, 2010 10:37 PM
If I have an income bucket that is being funded by two different accounts, how do I see how much each account is contributing to the income bucket. I loose the ability to validate that the amount in the income bucket to be used for distribution is in fact available.
--
Jesse
Support Staff 17 Posted by Kevin Hoctor on 27 Jul, 2010 12:50 AM
Jesse: The idea is that you fund your expense buckets with your amounts from your income buckets without regard to what account created the initial funding. When you spend your money, you do have to be aware of your account balances if you are using multiple cash flow accounts.