This page documents wizonesolutions's typical workflow. It's a good starting point for understanding how the system is supposed to work. It's also worth taking a look at #1918538: Rough roadmap, thoughts, known issues.
How to setup
- Set up income accounts and credit card/loan accounts. These are just vocabularies that you add taxonomy to. Then you can track where you income's coming.
- Set up tax rates. The same rates are also used for the auto-saving (R&D percentage) field. I currently have something like 31% (I'm in Norway) and 10%.
- System is pretty much ready (unless I'm forgetting steps).
How to use
- Every so often (somewhere between a week and a month), I log into the system.
- I add new expected income. Expected means that I know it's coming (my clients always pay). I obviously add the amount I'll receive (minus payment processing fees). Etc. etc.
- I add expenses, generally a month at a time. I also go through my email and add expenses that I have filed away to be added with a particular label. These are generally non-recurring ones. For recurring ones, I tag them as weekly or monthly, filter the Expenses page by the tag, and then just Copy them all.
- I do what I call allocating the income to expenses. This consists of going to the Expenses page, starting with the oldest unpaid expense (I filter by Amount Remaining Not Equal To: 0) and clicking Add Payment on each expense I want to pay. Sometimes I skip some if they're really big, or I pay an amount lower than what's due even if I have enough.
- The payment screen is neat. You just need to pick the income you want to use. You can also leave this blank if you want to simply record that it was paid from outside the system or whatever; I think it makes some error messages appear on the Payments page, but it's supposed to work by design. In practice, I just add an income for that "outside income" and use that).
Anyway, once you pick the income, it automatically fills in EITHER the full amount of the expense (if you have enough left in that income item) OR the full amount of the income item. It's smart, too; if you enter your own amount, it won't override what you put in the box.
- I rinse and repeat till I'm out of money.
- Now I go back to the Income screen. Now I filter by Amount Transferred: Empty. This shows me income I haven't transferred to the right place. So I start going through these. For each one, I click it to go to the full node. I scroll down to the embedded Payments view. This tells me what I have allocated this income to pay. I look at the Business column and use a calculator (app) to add up all the NON-business expenses. Then I go to my online banking and transfer that from my business account (or wherever the income came to, which would be recorded in the Income Account field) to my personal account. Then I fill in the FULL AMOUNT in the Amount Transferred field, tab out, get an AJAX error from the EditableFields module (but it actually works), and then I go back to the Income page. Usually I open each income item in a new tab and then just refresh the filtered Income page after each one.
- Once I'm done with that, I'm finally ready to pay stuff. So I go to the Payments page and usually filter by date. I also filter by Paid: No, which shows me which payments I haven't made yet. This begs some explanation. When you add a payment, you aren't saying that you paid something. You are saying that you are planning to pay something. Once you check the Paid checkbox and save, THEN you're recording that it's paid.
To make this easier, I usually filter by Card/Account to Pay Back and pay each credit card or account all at once. I repeat until none are left. I don't usually go one-by-one anymore. That's too tedious. Oh yeah, and "Account to Pay Back" refers to when I've borrowed money from myself (savings, for example). I record the payback plan as expenses. So those are kind of like transfers, but I have no need to distinguish. They are basically expenses anyway given that if I borrowed money from myself, I might have taken it from an account that needs it eventually to pay future expenses. Stuff like that.
- Right, so now I have paid everything...except tax savings and R&D (auto-saved money). So I go back to the Income view. I now filter by Amount Transferred: Not Empty and Tax Paid: No. In my case, I have two income accounts. One of them is the tax account. So first I handle the other one (I usually filter down to it in the Income Account filter at the top of the page); I just add up all the tax I have to save for and do an online banking transfer. Then I click the "Select All" checkbox, pick "Change field value" or whatever it's called, pick the Tax Paid field on the next screen, CHECK THE TAX PAID BOX (so I check two boxes), and click Save. Views Bulk Operations does its thing for a second, and then the screen should return no results (they're all filtered out now).
- Now I do the same thing for the account that is the tax account. In this case, I just add the amounts to an external spreadsheet where I track how much Tax and R&D money I have set aside.
- Finally, I do the previous two steps but with R&D Paid instead of Tax Paid.
- I complain about how long this all took and how I'm going to make Cash Flow better eventually.