Introduction

This article will show you how ribbel.net has grown out of a ambitious idea.

On ribbel.net you are taking part at the latest version of something we once called "Haushaltsplan" or "HBudget-Planung" at the very beginning. It is german and means "plan for private economy".

We are starting out at the present and work our way backwards in time, as the memory gets more and more fuzzy that way.
To be able to follow the descriptions, you probably want to log in first and try what you encounter there (if you haven't done that already). After playing around for a few minutes, you will get the picture. It will help you considerably to understand the following text.

Latest layout

The version we used before putting it on the web was a spread sheet based on OpenOffice 2.3.
That spreadsheet serves now as template for this webpage.
Only recently, a credit card module was added to the spread sheet that allows management of accumulated expenses. This means expenses which are not spend the day an item is bought, but are accumulated expenses payed at the end of a certian period (e.g. credit card). Of course, this module is available in the online version as well.

Of course, the online version has been impoved in several aspects over the spread sheet.
One of the major changes is the automatic creation of your income/expense topic. In the spread sheets this was not automated. One had to be very careful to write the correct topic in the appropriate field to keep the macros working. These macros were executed to sort the numbers and add to the correct fields. When topics from the calender were not appearing in the overview, a warning would pop up and one would have to go back to the last entry and check if both, the last entry in the calender and the topic in the overview have been written the same way. This is very unconvenient and not much of a plessure if you are about to enter many different expenses. Our aim on ribbel is to make it a joy, to enter values, which is why this was one of the first things that had to be immproved for you.

Further improvements have been done. The idea of having a spread sheet has been removed and the latest technology in web design was used to present you a more interesting way of entering numbers over and over again.

The year 2007, the same year when development on the website started, the spread sheet got its last major update. To give you an idea, it had 516 lines of macro code after that update. You probably can imagine its complexity, even if you have no clue what macros are about. Anyways, 516 sounds much, doesn't it?

In that version, macros were used for several things. First of all, every entered amount had to be transfered from its entered location - which was a single site including one month - to some kind of overview sheet. The overview sheet was a table which each column being a month and each row being something we call income or expense topic.
As one was able to enter values directly into the overview, another macro was used to do a recalculation affecting a complete year.

We had one "multiple purpose" expense topic. Every expense, that was named by that topic, was substracted from a remaining amount. The remaining amount started up at a fictive value which was set for every month.
An example.
You know that you will buy food for about 500 each month. Thats your fictive value that you expect to spend every month. The day, you actually buy some food, you substract that amount from the fictive value. You end up having 450 left for that particular month, to buy food for. You can imagine that you can work with that decreasing value in several ways. First of all, you might have to adjust the fictive value every now and then, to be larger than your actual expense. Second, you might want to control your monthly expenses on the food topic, such that you allways have money left to spend. Spending more than that fictive amount can be a bad thing. First, you are ending up with less money than you did your budget for. Second, your table will be no longer accurate and needs adjustment - unfortunatelly in the unpeasent direction. If you have enough money, to equal that out, this is not a problem.
Anyways, I got carried away, the substraction has been automated and is done by a macro.

Back in 2006, when the sheet from 2005 was replaced, rather large changes have been made. New tables have been added. These were sheets for configuration, loans, energy costs and insurances.
Previous versions of that spread sheet have included macros for FTP communication as well. This was needed to have the sheet online. Of course we wanted to access it from different PCs, which made it neccessary to place the sheet at a location accessible by everyone. Further, new macros had been added for loan calculation and adding their payments into the sheet at the appropriate places.

Before 2004, the picture is very fuzzy. There have been made several changes to the macro structure and again, errors were removed.

Things are getting fuzzy

Things are getting even more fuzzy when we look at the version made for the year 2003. It was a Microsoft Access Database with a user interface, also provided by MS Access. It was a very detailed database. Drop down lists enabled us to select from over twenty cathegories. It was very demanding to enter each and every expense down to a single item from the super market.

Now, we are all the way back in time. The year is 2002.
At the very beginning of this project, I was introduced to something called "weka". Besides being the flightless bird from New Zealand, it also is a piece of software used for Data Mining and Machine Learning applications. The basic idea at that time was to collect all the data from each expence and try to find a certain pattern which, at the end, lets you optimize your budget.


Very fast, within a few months actually, we realized that this is not bearable. It took nearly half an hour each and every day to enter each item that was bought e.g. at a super market run. At that time, an Microsoft Excel table was used to hold the vast amount of data. By the lack of macros, only the functionality of each field was used to add and substract different values, to finally get an overview.




Summary

As everyone can see, starting from a very amitious idea, several years of improvement, simplification and continuous testing have been gone by, to offer you this service at hand. Use it wisely and spread your experiences using our forum.