Cashflow is simple command line tool personal finance application that helps medium term planing.
It has three dependencies beside standard library: time, parsec and containers,
and they are all part of haskell platform, so if you have haskell platform
installed, you should be good to go.
Check out source
> git clone https://github.com/StarvingMarvin/cashflow.git
Build
> cd cashflow
> ./Setup.lhs configure
> ./Setup.lhs build
> ./Setup.lhs install
At its simplest, program takes input file as parameter
> cashflow input-file
if no file given, stdin is read.
Here is full list of potions:
-s MONTH --start-month=MONTH Starting month for estimate. Defaults to current month.
-e MONTH --end-month=MONTH Ending month for estimate. Defaults to Dec
-y --year-end Generates seed for next year file using data from current year
-h --help Prints this help message
Where MONTH is in same format as in input file that is Jan to Dec
Input is a very simple, human readable file, that closely matches the way I was writing things down anyway for 'manual analysis'.
Records are line oriented and most fields are separated by 'whitespaces' which are any combination of spaces, tabs and comas. Only exception is description that is separated with column.
Input file is split into five sections:
Expenses come after [expenses] heading and has a format:
description":" amount [["~"] month]
Examples:
[expenses]
# Summer vacation is planed and exact time is known
# as soon as July passes, it will not be taken in account
# when calculating estimates
Summer vacation: 2000 Jul
# Car will probably be bought some time by the end of May
# for the purpose of estimates expense is split equally from current
# month to May. When May passes, full amount is taken as expense.
# When car is finally bought, you will either remove it from list, or
# set exact month so that it stops being taken into account.
Car: 6000 ~May
# After some poking around the Internet, testing couple of devices etc.
# you will go out and actually by a stereo, but no exact date is known
# or planed. For the purpose of calculation it behaves same as ~Dec.
Stereo: 1500
description":" amount
example:
[monthly expenses]
Rent: 800
description":" amount month n-of-payments
example:
[debt]
(bank x visa)
item 1: 500 Apr 10
item 2: 700 Jun 12
(bank y master)
item 3: 300 Mar 3
Similar to monthly expense, except it has start (month) and end (month + n-of-payments). You can group by creditor as shown in example.
description":" amount
Monthly income
description":" amount
Cashflow is designed not for absolute precision, but for answering questions like 'is this kind of spending realistic?' To keep overhead at minimum, several simplifying assumptions are introduced:
- Month is the finest time resolution available, and it is also the coarsest
- If is recurring on period different than month, you need to sum it or average it yourself
- All numbers and calculations are integer only
- There is only one currency
I would like to add some sort of "transaction" feature for situations like "I plan to by something around August, but I'll by it on credit card therefore turning it into debt", or "I am putting $X monthly on my savings account"
There is also no notion of one-of income. I could probably make it by adding optional month on asset record, or something...
##FAQ
Ledger is an awesome tool that helps you track your finances and precisely track where your money is going. Once you figure out where do you spend money and what are you left with, Cashflow can help you do a back of a napkin sort of calculation to help you plan your future expenses.
This is my first Haskell project, and it's made in a week or so, draw your own conclusions.