VizNau, Update
Amazingly I have managed to crack on with the VizNau project and things are moving along nicely. The interface is still very bland and un-customized, and I have spent very little time styling any part of the system, as I prefer to have a solid base from which to build up the CSS etc. This saves time over the long run, even if the development code is ugly.
One of the major challenges I had to find a solution to in the original Adolpi was managed transfers of funds between accounts. For example say you are tracking a current account and a savings account, and you wish to show a transfer of 20GBP into your savings. This figure needs to be reduced from your current account balance and added to your savings balance. My botched solution prior to VizNau was simply to insert a record for both ends of the transaction, that is two rows in the database for one action. One would give details of the money leaving the current account and being moved to the savings, the other details of money coming from the current account into the savings. As you can imagine this is certainly not an ideal solution, not least because of the extra code required to perform operations on this ’single’ transaction. Every time a transfer was recorded two rows were entered, every time it was updated or edited, two rows were modified, every time a transfer was voided or deleted, two rows had to be managed. It was anarchy.
Fortunately with the shiny new project I got my head around the logic required to accomplish the same task, purely in MySQL and PHP and 100% on the fly. This means a single record of a transfer, coming or going (depending on debit or credit amount) from/to each account, to handle both the receiving and sending of funds. Every time it is edited a single row is updated, and both accounts are updated automatically with the new funds information, absolutely marvellous. Obviously this wouldn’t be possible if the system didn’t already calculate the current balance on the fly, which it does, however this does leave us with another problem, brought about by the medium over which we’re working. The calculations work great with the few dozen testing transactions I have at the moment, but what happens when it has been in action for a few months and this number quickly grows to several hundred or even thousand records in the database. Not to mention how many of these will be transfers etc. that require a little extra processing.
Fortunately I have been thinking ahead, taking many cues from Quicken 2006 I must say, and I’m planning out a reconciliation system in my head. Basically this means that every month (or other period, depending on how active a user you are) as you receive your statement, you can run a reconcile. This means you punch in the closing balance shown on the statement, tick the transactions off that you have entered, compared to those which your bank has, and perform any sundry items (such as adding interest charges/payments etc.) Once finished you hit a button and all those transactions are marked as reconciled. Hopefully some fancy PHP will then perform the required calculations on these transactions and, adding it to any previous finishing balance created this way, come out with a final balance up to that point in the accounts history. This is then stored and any new transactions and balance requests are filled using this new amount as the starting point.
Of course there are a few important things to note. Firstly, this needs to be a quick process, I know from experience that you can very quickly run up a large number of transactions on a card, and going through that statement to check them off can be a painstaking task. Therefore it needs to be as automated as possible, so you have an incentive to do it. Second, should any transaction amount before the reconciliation date need to be altered it will need to be run through the reconcile system again from that point forward, to update the current balance etc. with the new information. Both seem pretty simple to accomplish, so it hopefully won’t be long before you are hearing from me again.
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