HyperMoney

Woozle: Projects: HyperMoney

HyperMoney is my attempt to write a money-management program (as in Quicken or Microsoft Money) that is actually usable and has no Stupid Features. It will be Open Source, as soon as I have source worth publishing (as of 2005-08-06, it's all written in Microsoft Access 97). The next step may be to convert it to web-based application, as HTML could possibly overcome many of the interface design issues I'm encountering.

Project Goals

• To avoid shortcomings in existing money manager software: see HyperMoney: Flaws in Other Software
• To minimize the "setup curve", i.e. the amount of preparatory work needed before any useful amounts of data can be entered
• To provide all basic functionality needed for the following:
  • Tracking and balancing one's bank accounts, credit cards, and other basic types of money accounts
  • Tracking debts and loans involving one or more other parties of varying levels of disorganization (they might or might not send you regular statements or even reliable itemizations)
• To make data entry as painless as possible:
  • Easy identification of redundantly-entered transactions -- so you can Just Start Typing instead of worrying about where you left off last time
  • Deferred data massaging -- so you can Just Start Typing, and worry about assigning proper accounts and categories to things later; the program should keep track of incomplete data massaging so you can take care of it when you have time

Data Design

There are two main areas of concern: Accounts and Transactions. All other tables are supporting either or both of those, sometimes mainly for user-friendliness and not part of the core data design. User-friendliness functions include Grouping and Pre-entry (deferred data massaging).

Acccounts

Accounts table

Field	Type	Description
ID	int(4) autonumber
Name	text	short name for account
Descr	text	description and notes

Accounts are in a hierarchical tree, but this is mainly user-friendliness (though it can also be used for reports). The tree is in a separate table, Topics (see #Grouping), and the mapping from Accounts to Topics is in [Accounts x Topics].

Accounts x Topics table

Field	Type	Description
ID_Acct	int(4)	Accounts.ID
ID_Topic	int(4)	Topics.ID

Transactions

Every transaction consists of one or more TransParts associated with a master Transaction record. Inforamation about balances will be stored separately.

Trxacts table (Transactions)

Field	Type	Description
ID	int(4) autonumber
Descr	text	description of transaction
When	date	date when the transaction occurred, as recorded by user

TrxParts table (TransParts)

Field	Type	Description
ID	int(4) key autonumber
ID_Trx	int(4)	Trxacts.ID of master transaction
ID_Mode	int(4)	TrxModes.ID of transaction mode (source, target, equity, topic)
ID_Acct	int(4)	Accts.ID of account for this part of the transaction May be NULL to indicate that this is a "loose" piece of information
Seq	int(4)	Order in which this transaction part appears, among others of the same mode
ID_Type	int(4)	TrxTypes.ID of transaction type for this part
When	date	date when the transaction occurred, according to the institution hosting the account
Amount	currency	amount of transaction; positive = deposit, negative = withdrawal. Sum of all source parts plus all target parts must equal zero. Sum of all equity parts must equal sum of all target parts.

Grouping

Topics table

Field	Type	Description
ID	int(4) autonumber
Name	text	short name for topic, as shown in tree
NameFull	text	(optional) longer form of name for display outside of tree context
Descr	text	(optional) description of topic
ID_Parent	int(4)	Topics.ID of parent topic; NULL = this is a root topic

Links

• http://braincore.blogspot.com/2005/05/koding-what-am-i-koding-then.html - A Dutch developer discusses accounting software, briefly. Apparently they don't use checkbooks in Holland.