Discussion: how to handle income in cospend?

[shining-cat]

Hi! First of all, huge thanks for this app!! 💪 🎉 I am looking for input and ideas from others around the use of cospend.

I am just discovering the stats section after having input a few weeks of family expenses in cospend. Now what I'd like to be able to do is to have a more complete overview of all this by including the family income.

I tried entering a negative amount for a bill named salary, for a simple test. This kind of does and doesn't work: first, it ends up being really counter-intuitive having the income as negative and the expenses as positive values. This is not really a big issue, but then the graphs really don't make much sense then...

So what are your thoughts on this, have any of you wanted to include income in their projects, and how did it end? For now, I think I'll probably have to abandon the idea and externally confront the global expenses to the global income sums...

Thanks for sharing 😄

[julien-nc]

Hey, you probably know all that but still :grin: : Cospend (or IHateMoney or other similar software solutions) is not designed to track the money people own but rather money that was spent. The "final" goal is to compute relative balances between members. It's more about who owes what to the project and who's in advance in the project depending on what was payed. The goal is actually to avoid thinking in terms of "available" money and just see if the spendings are fairly shared in a group and, if not, who payed more than whom.

Injecting collective money into the group does not mean anything in Cospend as it does not change the members balances. Injecting individual money does not mean anything either. Receiving a salary does not change what you owe to the group and what the group owes you. No effect on the balances.

In the beginning, all members have a zero balance, it does not mean that they don't have any money :grin: but that nobody owes anything to the group.

Short answer could have been: Cospend's balance is not like a bank balance. It's relative to the project.

[DavidMndz]

Hello,

I agree that the income is not useful here, as this tool is awesome for tracking the expends but not for tracking the money you own. For example, you can create different projects for different topics to track the bills, like one project for home/family expenses and other for your personal hobbies.

What maybe could help is more details about how to put the balance to 0 again for some users, I tried to find out through the documentation but it is not fully clear to me yet. This might help as a substitute of the income and still keep the original idea of the application.