CA Planner has its first release: v0.1.0. The two earlier posts covered why the project exists and how monthly planning works. This one is shorter. It marks the point where the app stopped being an experiment and became the tool I actually use.
This release is far from complete. There is no rules engine for categorization, no budget per category, no horizon longer than a month, and the desktop build exists only for Apple Silicon Macs and is not signed.
What it does contain is the minimum I need to organize my daily life:
That list is the line I drew for a first release: not “every feature I can think of”, but “the day I stop needing the old process”.
The old process was a spreadsheet. Every week I went through my accounts, brought the new entries into it by hand and only then could look at the numbers. The monitoring itself is quick. Getting the data into shape was the part that took the time, and any week I skipped made the next one worse.
With v0.1.0 that weekly routine is a button. I press Sync, tag what came in, and look at the cash flow for the rest of the month. I am free from the spreadsheets for my weekly account monitoring. That alone justifies cutting a release now instead of waiting for the app to feel finished, because a tool in daily use is the best source of requirements I have. Everything on the list below came from using it, not from imagining it.
Import and export of the account information. Today the data lives in a database file plus a key file, and moving to another computer means copying both by hand with the app closed. The next release will have a proper export and import, to serve as a backup and to make changing computers a routine operation instead of a careful one.
Filters between company and personal accounts. The first version deliberately had no personal-versus-company concept, only a filter per account. Daily use showed that this is the cut I make most often: how is the company doing, how is the household doing. It deserves to be one click rather than a selection of accounts every time.
A better place for the categories when tagging. Tagging is the task I repeat the most, and today every category sits in one long list. The categories need to be organized and positioned so that the ones I use are close at hand, and tagging a week of transactions becomes quick.
Separate personal and company categories. A company tax and a household grocery run do not belong in the same list. Splitting the categories into personal and company sets makes each list shorter, which helps the previous item, and makes the totals per category mean something for each side.
The four items are related. Knowing which accounts are personal and which are company is what allows the filter, the split of the categories, and a shorter picker when tagging.
The code is on GitHub as CA Planner, MIT licensed.
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