GTK Finance Planner

Do you have monthly/semi-monthly/weekly/every 2 months/other oddly scheduled bills? Yearly? Every 2 years? Need a way to track them all in one place?

That's what this application is for. Finance Planner allows you to enter everything into a list and provide an estimate for what your balances will look like every day, between any date ranges that you specify.

Screenshots

Getting started

This application can be installed via Flatpak.

# if you do not have flathub added as a remote, please add it first, so that
# the necessary flatpak runtimes can be acquired:
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

# add my custom flatpak repository next:
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists com.charlesmknox.gtk-finance-planner https://gtk-finance-planner.flatpaks.charlesmknox.com/app.flatpakrepo

# install the flatpak:
flatpak --user install com.charlesmknox.gtk-finance-planner com.charlesmknox.gtk-finance-planner

Building from source

This application is compiled for Linux only, currently, and requires Go if you'd like to build it:

git clone https://github.com/charles-m-knox/gtk-finance-planner.git
cd gtk-finance-planner
go get -v # this will take a little while
go build -v
./gtk-finance-planner

Usage

Here's a fairly comprehensive guide on how to use this application:

1. Click + to add a new bill, and populate the details accordingly:
   1. The Amount column allows you to add a cost to a bill. All values are assumed negative, but if you put a + at the beginning, it can be registered as income, such as a paycheck.
   2. The Active column allows you to temporarily enable/disable a bill if you'd like to predict how a subscription will change.
   3. The Frequency column can be one of any three values (case-insensitive input): Monthly/Yearly/Weekly.
   4. The Interval column specifies how often the bill will occur. For example, if you selected Monthly for the Frequency, and you want it to occur every 2 months, then set the Interval value to 2.
   5. For the Monday-Sunday checkbox columns, you can choose whether or not a bill can occur on a specified day of the week. For example, if you buy Groceries weekly on Saturdays, then just check the Saturday checkbox and set your Frequency to Weekly, and your Interval to 1.
   6. For the Starts column, specify in the pattern YYYY-MM-DD for best results. This applies to the Ends column, too.
      1. If left at the default values (0-0-0) then the start and end are assumed to be the window for your estimation (these are the input boxes in the bottom right of the window).
   7. For the Notes column, you can put anything you want here. No special formatting will be applied.
2. Repeat step 1, optionally using the Clone button to speed things up where desired.
3. (optional) Enter a starting cash balance in the bottom left.
4. (optional) In the bottom center and bottom left input fields, enter a start date for the planner to begin, and an end date for when they will stop.
   1. If you leave these two blank, the planner will start from today and end 1 year from today. This is just enough time to be able to get a yearly summary of your expenses, which you will do easily in a moment.
5. Go to the Results tab. (you can press alt+1 and alt+2 to switch between tabs quickly)
   1. You will see the planner's results!
   2. If viewing over a single year, press ctrl+I on your keyboard to be presented with a dialog that rolls up your yearly income and expenses. This is very useful!
6. Save your bills to a configuration file! To do this, you can do any of the following, like you'd traditionally expect:
   1. Use the dropdown arrow in the top left of the window to see all options, such as save/save as/open/save results/new window/etc.
   2. Ctrl+Shift+S - Save as. You'll need to do this if it's your first time saving to a new file.
   3. Ctrl+S - Save.
   4. Ctrl+O - Open.
   5. Ctrl+Shift+O - Open in a new window.
   6. Ctrl+N or Ctrl+Shift+N - Create a new config in a new window.
   7. Ctrl+W - Close the current window.
   8. Ctrl+Q - Quit the application.

Quirks/Limitations/Bugs

There are a couple minor quirks:

• If you receive paychecks on e.g. the last day of the month, there is currently no direct method of doing this. I typically go with setting the Starts column to something like 2022-01-28, since every month of the year ends on or after the 28th day, guaranteed.
• Sorting is currently not supported in a pleasant manner. Sorry about this - I want this feature too, but I struggled working with the TreeView's documentation.
• Some GTK theming issues, such as the icon when in the alt+tab interface or the application's name, have not been corrected. I'm not really sure how to do this with gotk, it's not documented in the example code from what I could see. Would like to fix this some time in the future.
• No way to sort bills, aside from editing the JSON config file itself.

Development notes

A GTK3 desktop application written in Go, using gotk.

This application is unpolished (but the underlying library providing the finance logic is unit tested and should work well). I do not view it as a good representation of "ideal" code. I have not refactored or enhanced the code. I initially wrote this application in 1 weekend. There are going to be bugs. It still works pretty well though.

Flatpak building and publishing

Run the following commands to build and publish a flatpak, which currently is configured to use GitHub pages as the flatpak repo:

# WARNING: Publishing is a dangerous operation if you have lots of in-progress
# changes.
#
# Commit and/or stash your changes to git first!! the entire repo goes through
# some chaos and creates an orphan branch

# first, build locally and install into a local flatpak - this installs
# and may override your existing installation of this flatpak application, if
# you have one:
make build-linux-amd64 flatpak-build

# publishing will do quite a bit of git operations and will push a fresh
# orphan branch to the github pages branch, with brand new code and an empty
# commit history
make flatpak-publish

Attributions

The app's icon is modified from Font Awesome, license here: https://fontawesome.com/license