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Welcome to the baronial wiki!
Here we seek to answer all of your questions about using baronial for your budgeting needs!
In many ways, baronial implements a system similar to a double-entry accounting system. Each transaction gets denoted in two or more places as a credit or debit, and parity is ensured by keeping a balance. However, unlike a more traditional system, where there are "real", "personal", "nominal" accounts, baronial has two concepts: accounts and the budget.
Largely, each individual account is going to be something opened with a financial institution to hold your money or extend credit (i.e. a checking account, credit card, savings account, or brokerage account.) While these are very traditional, there's nothing stopping the very enthusiastic budgeter from tracking their PayPal or Venmo account balances, the cash in their wallet, or even rewards points.
Unlike other accounting systems, Baronial negates liabilities up-front. In other-words, if you spend money on a credit card the account balance in Baronial goes negative where the account balance on the statement will go up. This keeps things very simple. Anytime you have spent money, you "debit" the account from which the money came. Any time you are receiving money, you "credit" the account it came to. There are no rules to memorize about types of accounts, or tricks to consider; just simple vocabulary. Debit when you have parted ways with money, credit when you have received money.
The effect of this strategy is that once your transactions are all added to baronial, the sum of all of your account balances is your net-worth. (Assuming you track everything in Baronial that is!)
Once you've figured out how much spending power is available to you by finding the sum of the balances of your accounts, it's time to divide that spending power into different categories. The budget seeks to show precisely that split. When done correctly, the sum of all of the balances of all the budget will be exactly equal to the sum of all of the balances of your accounts.
There are nearly as many different ways that you could organize money as there are people on Earth today. Baronial's goal is to allow you to capture the way you want to organize your finances without imposing any philosophy. Over time more features will certainly come. However, the tools that baronial provides out of the box today are:
- The ability to split up your money in a nested fashion, the way you're already used to storing files in folders on your computer. Each folder represents a different category or sub-category of spending.
- Commands that allow you to easily fetch the balance of a particular folder, or find the sum of the funds a folder and all of its children.
- The ability to create transactions, and split a single transactions effects across many budgets and/or accounts as appropriate.
- Safe-guards, to warn you if you're ever about to create a transaction that puts your accounts out of balance with your budget.
- The ability to look through the history of your transactions, filtering by account or budget.
A lot of baronial's functionality is written assuming it will be called by another program, and not just viewed with human eyes. Today their is only one library to help you, written in the Go programming language, but it is linked optimistically in table format below with the hope that there will one day be many options in many languages.
| Language | Library | License |
|---|---|---|
| Go | envelopes | Apache 2.0 |