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A comment on Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting. Parent comment

Re:Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting by jgalvez on Monday May 28, 2018 @01:15PM (#17173539)
That's actually my most common use. If my organization is a mess in a given week, I just open a new sheet and go:

    + 100 Wallet
    + 800 Account
    + 50 Piggybank
    - 100 Some urgent expense
    - 150 Another urgent expense
And then I figure it out. It's the fastest way for me to get these calculations done.
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Re:Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting by jasode on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:04PM (#17174144)
>That's actually my most common use. [...], I just open a new sheet

I think this answer explaining your most common usage actually explains better what you've built and its (unstated) philosophy. What you've created is a "scratchpad for arithmetic" that parses the numbers in plain text.[1] (Or stated another way, a "freeform spreadsheet" without the row col gridlines.) You then choose to call that functionality "budgeting".

My lightbulb moment: This is why non-existent datetime data isn't "missing" in your tool because "math scratchpads" don't need dates. I also see why you see your tool as "simpler" than the other text-based accounting tool "ledger-cli". ledger-cli is definitely not a math scratchpad; it's based on transactions of debits/credits which is overkill for a scratchpad.

I understand it better now. If you want to call your text parser math scratchpad -- a "budgeting" tool, I won't quibble with that. However, a lot of other people think of "budgeting" as money planning with a time horizon beyond the boundaries of a scratchpad. My earlier comments were based on that wider expectation of "budgeting". I'm not saying a budget tool has to be as feature-heavy as Quicken or Mint but many people would need something with slightly more functionality than a math scratchpad.

[1] Your parsexxx() functions are not specific to the domain of money budgeting but for any numbers with text labels to be added/subtracted/multiplied: https://github.com/galvez/plainbudget/blob/master/src/pages/...

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Re:Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting by jgalvez on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:24PM (#17174275)
Thing is, the way I put this parser together, it should be quite easy to add group variables (linking to results from another group by preceding with $ or something) and some forecasting functionality using standard date formats (I myself use "= XXX Month YEAR").

This was an amazing thread that gave me lots of ideas. I plan on keeping this codebase moving forward with them.

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