Show HN: BudgetFlow – Budget planning using interactive Sankey diagrams

Money is fungible. That is what makes it money. You're just thinking of different ways to allocate it.

A dollar in an account is fungible. Are all the dollars that show up on the W2 going to the same account? Do some of them not even hit the main account?

If I made $3000 this month and $300 of that went to a retirement account and $1000 of that went to tax withholdings and another $300 went to child support, and of the remaining $1400, I had direct deposit put $1000 in savings and $400 in allowance... how would that be represented?

I contend that for this (these numbers are purely made up for ease of talking about):

    (income 1)
    $3000 -> $300 child support
          -> $300 company retirement plan
          -> $1000 tax withholdings 
          -> $300 allowance -> {various 'fun' expenses}
          -> $1100 savings  -> {various 'not fun' expenses}

    (income 2)
    $2000 -> $700 tax withholdings
          -> $200 allowance -> {various 'fun' expenses}
          -> $1100 savings  -> {various 'not fun' expenses}

Having $2000 and $3000 go into one big bucket of a 'main' account, while working under the 'all money is fungible' fails to capture some reality of how money flows. For example, if income 1 loses their job, child support goes to $0 (not $300 from income 2) as does the $300 for retirement and the $1000 for tax withholdings.

Fungibility != allocatability

Money itself is fungible, else you'd be marking every single dollar bill specifically with some unique mark.

But still, I'm curious what you mean by your last paragraph, do apps that utilize the envelope method such as You Need A Budget not already help you do this?

Might it be more effective to try to get such people to think of money as fungible?

But they already have those tools. That's why they think that way. They have their current account, savings account etc. The point of these tools is to be better than those tools.

This is so much better. For me the raison d'être of Sankey diagrams is to show the dependencies in money flows.

For example if I earn $500 from freelance work, but spend $200 on marketing and $400 on transport to do that, then a Sankey diagram like the one on the front page where everything gets intermingled in a main account and expenses get deducted at the end make it seem like this freelance work is a good thing and I should probably do more. In a good Sankey diagram I would immedately deduct the expenses from the freelance work, and see that instead of freelance income reaching my budget I'm actually subsidizing freelance work from my salary income.

Similarly in your example it's immediately obvious that if the wage would vanish a lot of the taxes would also vanish

Is there a name for a specialized Sankey graph that also retains color across the combination stage?

It'd start to be a layout algorithm at that point, but example input arm 1 being orange (everything else blue) and the orange then subdividing into its ultimate destinations. Eg. 20% of this output, 15% of this one...

That's a better visualization than most people present.

An example of one that disappoints is https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15f01pb/oc... where that one big bucket of 'total applications' loses a lot of data. Was everything from Dice ghosted? That would be useful information. I would contend that there's no value in the 'total applications' bucket in there at all other than to sum up the leftmost column - which can be done separately.

One big bucket isn't necessarily wrong, but if one is trying to show off the features of the Sankey diagram, showing it with the stronger representations that it is capable of doing can be useful.

Having seen countless poorly done ones with an everything bucket in the middle that squashes valuable relationships between the inputs and outputs... and that's a turn off for me when they are presented that way.

When you say freelance goes directly to savings, are you saying you want something like "no matter what I earn from freelance it goes to savings"?

Yes. Or another account so that you have clear accounting for tax purposes. "This account gets freelance money and this money was spent for home office expenses related to the freelance work which is deductible from that income stream."

Child support obligations come out of one income as a percentage of that income - but not the other. A two income family where the husband is paying 10% of wages to child support for example - its 10% of his $1000 / month that never hits the main account, but her $500 /month is untouched and goes to the shared account. This could be complicated if she was a 1099 worker and needed to keep track of that money separately so that it could have the proper taxes taken out of that and have the resulting "actual money" that is spendable go into the "can be spent" bucket.

While money is fungible, the depiction of money flows when it hits a "one big bucket" makes it so that the value behind the Sankey diagram is lost. Is all the money that your household makes taxed the same way? Do you file jointly or separately? Is there a separate account for isolating certain expenses for reporting purposes?

https://alternativeenergyatunc.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo... is useful and one will note the lack of a big bucket. Or consider the original one - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/JIE_Sank...

There is information lost when it goes to one big bucket.

I've been using Monarch for the last 6 months when I heard Mint was shutting down. It's been a dream to use and I feel good paying directly for software that I believe they will continue investing in. It even supported more bank/credit connections than Mint was able to.

I referred my sister last week and I got a discount. So I am going to throw this out there in case anyone wants to try it:

https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/qrg5tt40me

I'm also a fan of monarch. Thanks for this; I didn't realize they had it. I wish I could have more control over the feature, but it's nice to see it there.

Well, I'm considering purchasing Monarch because of this feature, so not sure that's true. I am a visual learner, but the reason I like them is they help me at a glance see the flow of money through multiple categories. Some systems represent this as pie charts you drill down on, but a Sankey shows it all at once glance. As far as actionable insight, they help decide areas that would be most beneficial to reduce expenses or increase revenue.

[...] and never understood what use they were to anyone.

Different people consume data in different ways. For some, data is easier to understand when arranged in tables, black on white, as they can skim through a lot of datasets quite easily.

Others benefit by a colorful, graphical representation, which Sankey provides.

From my experience in consumer facing applications, I'd assume that a colorful, flashy, nice-looking Sankey could boost sales. People prefer things that look nice.

The Plaid API JSON includes inferred transaction categories.

OFX is one alternative to CSV for transaction data.

ofparse parses OFX: https://pypi.org/project/ofxparse/

W3C ILP Interledger protocol is for inter-ledger data for traditional and digital ledgers. ILP also has a message spec for transactions.

Thanks for chiming in here. I use Monarch and didn't realize there was a Sankey visualization. Actually I didn't know what that type of visual was even called before this post.

Yeah this is where most budgeting tools fail me. These tools often provide super detailed categories that the user just has to make educated guesses about- and the onus is then on the user to abide by their guesswork. Not to mention how these tools pretend that expenses all happen in neat monthly/yearly cycles.

Budgets are useful for savings goals, but it's difficult to plan day-to-day spending beyond very high-level categories.

I personally find retrospective diagrams more useful - a breakdown of what my actual expenses were so that I can update my mental model and find subscriptions (or habits) to eliminate.

I recommend Kyle Michell's Fast Path [0] terms. I'll grant that I'm familiar with Michell's work, but haven't read these particular terms. Kyle Michell publishes 'plain language' licenses. For example, compare how Blue Oak Model [1] and MIT [2] grant permission. Obviously, Michell has the benefit of lots of discourse following the induction of MIT's license and indicates a link can substitute for the full license text. I highlight this, not to argue for Blue Oak, but to indicate that Michell's Fast Path terms likely take half the space of typical software terms.

``` Blue Oak Model

Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would otherwise infringe that contributor’s copyright in it.

You must ensure that everyone who gets a copy of any part of this software from you, with or without changes, also gets the text of this license or a link to https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0.

``` MIT

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

[0] https://fastpathlicense.com/

[1] https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0

[2] https://opensource.org/license/MIT

I think entities or nodes can be categorized as incoming, outgoing, and internal transfers. Once you get this right, the natural next step is to take time into account. The current chart is the ideal moneyflow, but from months to months I’ll deviate from it. Taking time into account means that these deviations are saved and analyzed. It also means one can analyze or prospectively test new allocations: given average annual returns on investments, what would my savings look like in the future? How did it evolve over time? That’s just my thoughts on it

You could just hide the button if the user isn't logged in to not confuse people.