Cash Flow

Curated finance tracking for freelancers, independent developers, and power budgeters. Well, actually it's mostly for me, but those people might like it too.

#1918538: Rough roadmap, thoughts, known issues is the best place to get the current overall picture. Long, but detailed.

Shameless plug: I'm not currently using this myself. I'm currently working on Spendflow, a more focused spending-tracking application.

The Un-Sales Pitch

How do you currently track your finances? If you're like me, you've built your fair share of spreadsheets.

You probably started with something where you tracked incomes as positive line items and expenses as negative ones. If your balance was negative at any point, then your expenses exceeded your income.

This probably worked well for a while.

"But wait," you said. "Which income line is paying which expense? I'll add a Source column and reference the rows in question." And, after fighting with formulas way longer than you should have, you managed. It was still a pain, but it got the job done.

Next, you wondered: "Hmm, how do I know how much money to transfer from my business account to my personal one? I pay business expenses from my business account." So you added more columns to categorize expenses more precisely, and calculations that could tell you how much you needed to transfer between accounts. This was painful.

Still, it wasn't complete. There was nearly no automation. Administration was painful. It took you a long time.

And finally, you reached a turning point: "...I'm a Drupal Developer. Why don't I just build myself a site, cook up some Rules and Views, and handle the most important parts of the spreadsheet automatically?"

So you did. Over a year later, you named the fruits of your labor Cash Flow and released an initial version of it to the world.

What do you mean, "Curated"?

This module will never pull in external information automatically. This is by design. It is not quite an accounting system, and it's not quite a budgeting system; it's just a planning tool to help you allocate your money where it's needed and to remember to pay things when they're due.

That said, I use this system, and I don't like repeating myself, so I will be adding in sensible automation.

Customizing your site

This module is only a Features package, so it doesn't control all aspects of your site. Changing the setup that it provides out of the box will cause the Administer » Structure » Features page to show Overridden for one or more of the Cash Flow modules. You can safely save your own overrides using Features Override, however. If you don't do this, you'll have a hard time upgrading to new releases of Cash Flow.

Features

I'll flesh this out more soon. Basically, it's:

Expenses, Income, Payments

(JavaScript-based, a.k.a. lazy man's) shortcuts when cloning income/expenses ("Copy to next month, remove Clone of, etc.")

Some tagging

Some utility modules

Automatic calculations of Tax, Savings (by percent), and Amount Remaining for both Income and Expenses. When you set up a payment for an Expense, the amount of the Payment is subtracted from the Amount Remaining on both.

Used-up income and paid expenses don't appear in the Payment dropdowns unless you're editing one that was saved with them.

Installation, dependencies, recommended

Be aware that Cash Flow was developed with fairly fresh installations of Drupal in mind. You should make a backup if you are using it in another situation. You are welcome to file issues to make it work more like you want.

Installation: Download and turn on Cash Flow. This will enable all dependencies.

Dependencies: Pretty ridiculous; if you use Drush, you'll get them all. I'll trim this down over time and make them recommended instead. Gotta start somewhere.

WARNING: You have to use the 7.x-1.x-dev version of UUID if you want to use Cash Flow Deluxe. It won't accept the broken 7.x-1.0-alpha3 release.

Recommended modules to download or enable: Diff, Views UI (views_ui), Context UI (context_ui).

Roadmap

Now at #1918538: Rough roadmap, thoughts, known issues!

Support

Minimal. Having this out in the open helps me if I need to build another site with it, and I'll try to answer reports and requests in the issue queue as fast as I can.

Please don't build business-critical stuff on this unless you can support it yourself or compensate the author handsomely (he's...I'm not expecting to make any money off of this).

Support will be fickle and heavily skewed towards stuff I want myself.

Co-maintainers definitely welcome. My main goal with releasing this is that others might have good ideas that I (and anyone else) could use in tracking my finances.