Show HN: Budget Kanban – Visually manage finances in Kanban boards

Show HN: Budget Kanban – Visually manage finances in Kanban boards(budgetkanban.com)

54 points by JustroX 2 years ago | 53 comments

Hi HN!

Budgeting can often feel overwhelming, especially when just starting out. That's why I'm thrilled to share what I'm working on for the past month, Budget Kanban, a visual tool to easily manage project finances using Kanban boards.

With Budget Kanban, you gain: 1. Real-time visibility into each project's financial status: Keep track of your finances effortlessly, knowing exactly where each project stands financially. 2. Stress relief from having an organized and easily understandable financial overview: Say goodbye to financial chaos and hello to clarity and peace of mind. 3. Reduction of time spent on manual data entry and corrections: Streamline your workflow and spend less time on tedious tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters. 4. Enhanced ability to identify and rectify budget issues swiftly: Spot potential issues early on and take proactive measures to address them, preventing headaches down the road. 5. Increased accuracy in budget allocation and monitoring: Make informed decisions with confidence, ensuring your resources are allocated efficiently and effectively.

I'd love for you to give Budget Kanban a try and share your thoughts .

Have a fantastic day! - Just

linuxdude314 2 years ago |

This looks like way more work than just using a spreadsheet.

Kanban don’t seem like the right abstraction for financial planning.

How does this actually prevent budget overrun when nothing is automated? It seems like the data is only accurate if someone correctly enters it and drags the boxes into the appropriate columns.

The app looks nice, but this feels like a solution in search of a problem.

You could easily pivot to project management and you’d have a very nice looking product. Ditch the budget stuff, it doesn’t work.

cjk2 2 years ago | |

Yeah this. After futzing with Excel for over a decade, I switched to GNUcash and the budgeting didn't work, then two other commercial products which didn't work, then I tried to design a product which would solve the problem and that didn't work either. So here I am back on a spreadsheet.

The problem is sometimes things aren't ideal or simple to represent. A spreadsheet forms no restrictions so you can ad-hoc futz with split transactions and all sorts without shooting yourself or getting stuck. Every other way of handling this is just pain and friction.

eddd-ddde 2 years ago | | |

Do you have a template you could recommend? I have really tried to fit my records into spreadsheets and I just never seem to get something working for some reason. I think my brain is just not wired up for spreadsheets.

gala8y 2 years ago | | |

This twice. Spreadsheet means flexibility.

JustroX 2 years ago | | |

Thanks for the feedback cjk2! I'm curious which industry you work on?

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Thanks for your feedback! I've been using Kanban for managing my finances for months, which inspired me to create this product. I'm addressing my own needs and it's working well for me. If others find it helpful too, that's great! And if not, I'm confident that Budget Kanban won't get in their way of managing their budget using their own tools

mattbrewsbytes 2 years ago |

I don't understand the problem this solves. It appears this is for a business to track project expenses? Don't businesses use actual accounting software to track expenses, etc.? How does this reflect or compete with that?

I don't think this makes any sense for personal finance.

datavirtue 2 years ago | |

My guess is that they were trying to address the collaboration aspect of budgeting. It is usually a fairly large group planning effort where the budget starts out looking a certain way and is iterated on rather quickly (hopefully, and herein lies the problem) as input is reconciled and ideas are explored.

However, this product seems to use a planning and collaboration methodology to track actual money movement. Something that might work for personal use but has little-to-no place in a company.

Closi 2 years ago | |

While invoices will get tracked to a cost-center in the accounting package, usually project managers won't access this directly and will have their own spreadsheets to the side to manage plan vs actual (i.e. they may also need to think about spending, and will update the sheet as their estimated costs change, do baselines etc).

throwaway11460 2 years ago | |

Actual accounting software doesn't care about projects. You get a $10k invoice - now the question is what projects is it related to, what amounts...

ska 2 years ago | | |

Actual accounting software is double entry. You’ll move that invoice through AP, and the balancing transactions will be split by project/type/etc by a combination of accounts and perhaps labels/tags.

sdf4j 2 years ago | | |

that’s not true. Serious accounting software let you assign an invoice to a project, program, cost center, groups… you can even do that on at the invoice item level.

steve1977 2 years ago | | |

Actual accounting software can certainly care about that. This is called operational or cost accounting (vs financial accounting, which would be accounts payable etc.)

itronitron 2 years ago |

I'd rather install software than 'sign up' to use something hosted elsewhere, especially for anything involving private information especially finances.

qwertox 2 years ago | |

I agree. If they are getting hacked in two-three years, hackers will know who they really want to target.

I was interested in this, but not being able to clone it from GitHub and run it on a local machine, immediately turned me off and made me think "this is nothing but an ad".

TiredGuy 2 years ago |

I like how this uses something familiar (Kanban) in a novel way to address the real-time tracking of a budget.

I wonder if maybe another useful feature would be to schedule a card to be automatically moved to another column at a certain date for things like contract fulfillment, or schedule a recurring card to be added each month for paychecks and monthly bills. Or is that already a feature? I could also see building upon that to see a rudimentary forecast of the state of finances at specified dates in time.

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Thanks TiredGuy! Automated card is my exact next feature :D. Because I'll be using it to track my subscriptions. I'm actually super close to including it in my mvp, but decided to cut it so I could launch sooner. Thanks for the feedback!

vslira 2 years ago |

Loved the idea! Admit I should use for a while because it's unclear if it's really ergonomic, but overall super interesting. Congratulations on the launch!

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Thanks vslira!

mNovak 2 years ago |

Actually I could see this being very popular for wedding planning; something inherently collaborative, with clear categories, that people are actively trying to budget to a specific number. I mean yes, numerous spreadsheet templates exist for this, but you're basically selling a pleasant interface (it does look great!).

I have a harder time imagining this for business use cases, unless maybe you really focus on the approval/reimbursement flows.

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the input mNovak! That's a great perspective :D. I'll definitely consider it :D

visch 2 years ago |

Can you show a realistic example where folks have 20-50 items they are budgeting for monthly? I can't imagine it working for that kind of use case so I moved on

datavirtue 2 years ago |

Seeing this just reminds me of how all software is ephemeral these days. It used to be that you would buy something like this for $20 at EggHead or MicroCenter and use it for the next thirty years without paying another dime. Useful. Now everything is cloud-subscription based. You play the good customer, pay for years, and then it closes down and you have nothing to show for it. Garbage. Excuse me while I slink back to my spreadsheet.

calvinmorrison 2 years ago |

does anyone like YNAB or etc? I use a spreadsheet still and what I like about my setup is it not only projects cash over time by including known expenses and incomes over time, but adjustments so I can actively reconcile it as I move forward through time.

YNAB and other tools dont seem to help me there.

rco8786 2 years ago |

Could you let me know who did the demo video? Looks great.

JustroX 2 years ago | |

I did :D I used screen.studio

kkfx 2 years ago |

Well... Nice UI but... I track my finances with org-mode and Beancount/Fava for UI and well it's far more clear for me, not only because the current state of things but because the "new views" I can easily make.

Kanban was born to help mass produce mechanical parts, and for that's is very effective, but to follow or design things, like many do today, it's not good at all IMVHO...

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Happy for you to find the tool that works for you :)

kkfx 2 years ago | | |

It's not a critic to Budget Kanban devs, it's a critic to modern UIs and to single-entry bookkeeping in general.

A small example: let's imaging you auto-import your groceries thanks to some supermarkets that offer csv export of tickets. If you track expenses you do not know nothing beside a total amount or at maximum a total amount per vendor. If you track in double-entry you can slice your transactions as much as you want: you have the total amount of groceries, the total amount per vendor, but potentially the total amount of cheese, meet, salad and so on. The total amount of cheese regardless of where you bought it I mean. Automagically you have your stock and also a diary balance of what you eat. All on the same data.

Budgeting up front is the same, you can create nth accounts and "move money" between them, with all balancing options at hand.

No UIs can compete with autocompleted text and views eventually generated from it, entirely user-constructed, with graphs of any kind, statistics and so on.

Finally there is a bottomline: tracking finances, notes, ... are long-term stuff, switching tools in most cases, especially switching modern tools, is a nightmare. Text can be manipulated easily and any workflow in the end might be bend easily, UIs are a different story, switching even if you have some export-then-import ability mean also learn a new workflow adapting yourself to the tool instead of the contrary. So far NO ONE on Earth have succeeded crafting something as flexible as text an UIs built out of it.

thatha7777 2 years ago |

I found the "Sign up for free" option too misleading for my preferences: it leads you to create a project, which immediately leads to a payment page. I guess I did "sign up for free", but I'm not sure what signing up got me.

Kudos on getting my email —— I hope I don't get any marketing materials I didn't consent to.

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Understood, the message can be confusing, so I'll take it down. Originally, it was meant for individuals invited to a board by someone else, allowing them to sign up without creating a board. If it's causing confusion, I'll make sure to clarify it.

If you'd like, I can delete your account. Just use the feedback widget on the site to let me know which account you want to be deleted. Also, rest assured, I don't send any marketing materials.

thatha7777 2 years ago | | |

I just wanted to acknowledge how wholesome your answer was, and thank you for it.

(Hopefully you get acquired sometime soon, and then "you"'ll be sending marketing materials :P -- like it or not.)

chenshuiluke 2 years ago |

I signed up expecting to be able to at least give it a try for free but I was almost immediately shown a subscription plan change. Is there a way to delete my account?

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Hi. I can delete your account :D. Send me the details in the feedback widget located at the lower right corner. Thanks!

MissTake 2 years ago |

Starts at $5 a month with no free option or trial?

No thanks.

lenerdenator 2 years ago | |

That's not particularly out-of-line for budgeting software, at least if it keeps your data private.

But yeah, trial would be nice.

I still sort of hope for a good FOSS budgeting software for Apple's devices but I'm currently using Copilot (not the AI front-end) and like it so far.

EDIT:

I would say the issue with budgeting software is that overall it's not going to be something that offers hockeystick growth for investors, because there's really only so much that business problem needs. I need a list of accounts with fresh data imported from the financial institution's servers (securely), and a way to CRUD the transactions on that account in ways that make sense of the data. That's... it. There is no new frontier. It's 100% dull-as-dishwater, boring-but-necessary responsible adult stuff. Add in the part where more people would like you not to sell their financial info or advertise a slate of financial services to them, and really you just don't have a lot of revenue opportunities.

There's been Manage Your Money, Microsoft Money... what else has been released then put to pasture?

DLarsen 2 years ago | | |

I like the creativity of the new form factor.

My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.

0xdeadbeefbabe 2 years ago | | |

> fresh data

Good luck with that.

fghafoor 2 years ago |

Just bought to test but after payment goes back to a broken link ( goes to .app domain instead of .com )

JustroX 2 years ago | |

Hi fghafoor! I'm checking it now. If you have the time, can you send the details using the feedback widget so I could fix it faster. Thank you!

JustroX 2 years ago | | |

Fixed it. Thanks for the notice

layer8 2 years ago |

The name suggests a low-cost kanban solution, not a kanban solution for budgeting.