Description
Hi all - thanks for the fantastic tool!
Summary
Please could the 3x time-based graphs in /income_statement, /balance_sheet, and /account/FOO/ (the "Changes" graph), and the 2x tables in /account/FOO/balances/ and /account/FOO/changes/ learn how to aggregate data by fiscal year, not just calendar year?
Background
One of the more legal-requirement-driven things I use Fava and Beancount for is to track my ISA and SIPP contributions. In the UK, those are pre-retirement tax-free savings (ISA) and retirement savings (SIPP). Each has a contribution limit, which mustn't be exceeded inside any individual tax year. I use Fava's excellent fiscal-year-end option to teach it about the UK fiscal calendar, which starts on April 6th.
Now, it's possible to track these contributions by including the year of contribution inside the Account name.
But as I started to design my Beancount setup, alongside digging in to what Fava could do for me, I realised this was unnecessary: Fava's time filter, operating across time-relevant Expense or Income accounts, elegantly gives me what I need.
I "hairpin" the contributions through a pair of net-zero Expenses accounts - a technique I keep meaning to write up, as I've not seen it exposed much, and it's really really useful:
2020-03-01 * "Personal pension contribution"
Assets:UK:Bank:CurrentAccount -10,000 GBP
Expenses:Contributions:Pension:In:Personal 10,000 GBP
Expenses:Contributions:Pension -10,000 GBP
Assets:UK:PensionOrg:SIPP 10,000 GBP
So, over any time period, the contents of Expenses:Contributions:Pension shows me how much my pension has had contributed to it during that period, and I can see the amount contributed when I select (e.g.) "2018" as the time filter.
But when I select dates across more than one calendar year (e.g. via FY2018) I end up with a "Yearly" graph showing 2 values: the calendar-2017 and calendar-2018 contributions.
Even "worse" ( YKWIM ;-) ), if I expand the time filter to include a range including multiple calendar years (e.g. using the very small feature I just PR'd in #1157), then not only do I see each fiscal year's info split across multiple years, but I also see different fiscal year's contributions merged into the same calendar year. The info presented isn't at all actionable against the legal "you may not contribute more than X,000 GBP in any fiscal year" mandate.
The 5 places I've identified in which it would be fantastically useful to teach Fava to aggregate/summarise by fiscal year in addition to calendar year are these (in decreasing order of my sense of how personally useful I'd find them):
/income_statement's graph/account/FOO/'s "Changes" graph view (the "Account Balance" doesn't feel like it would benefit, to me)/account/FOO/changes/'s table/account/FOO/balances/'s table/balance_sheet's graph
[ That order's not here to insist upon anything; it's just here to expose a user-level datapoint! ]
Unlike #1157, where the small change was in a language I know, I'd have to do a /lot/ of getting up to speed with TS and JS to help, here! I'm happy to try and do so, but this does feel like the sort of change where someone skilled-in-the-art would be able to knock it out far quicker than I!
Thanks again for Fava - I find it hugely useful!
Activity