Inzolo Blog

I’m in the process of adding functionality to edit and delete bank accounts. I found there were going to be some issues with deleting bank accounts as they are tied to transactions. To make a long story short, I made a bad assumption that every transaction was associated with a bank account. That is not the case. Transactions are created for allocation and transferring between envelopes. I made a mistake and deleted all transactions on the server that were not associated with a bank account. What this means is when you click on an envelope or category, you will not see any allocation history!

Unfortunately, I did this quickly without thinking and there is no way for me to restore this. All I can do is apologize and promise to be more careful in the future. Sorry!

UPDATE: So thankfully I have an awesome web hosts that backs up my system automatically every day and keeps the past 10 days worth of back-ups on hand. I was able to restore that which I so stupidly deleted. I suppose there could be a few transactions that were missed between the back-up time and my blunder, but I think that damage has been greatly minimized – if not altogether resolved. Again, sorry about the ordeal.

There was a problem with Inzolo that I let slide during development and an Inzolo user, Craig M. was helpful to point out that it was more serious than I thought. The problem was that when you allocated or transferred funds, a transaction record was only created in the envelope you were allocating or tranferring to and not in the envelope where the funds came from. At first I didn’t think it was a big deal and logged in on my to do this to get to at some point, but since I implemented the envelope summaries his threw off the calculations.

I’m happy to report that I’ve fixed this problem. With the fix I had to rework the undo feature for these type of transactions. Overall the solution should be much better now.

I’ve uploaded a number updates to Inzolo this morning. Here are the most notable:

• A payment plan is finally in place. You can see the plan options on the pricing page. Basically there is a "free forever" type plan that will display advertisements, limit data history, limit SSL security, and disables automatic transaction downloads. These are really the only 4 limitations. To remove these limitations the monthly membership price is $7.23.
• Code has been put in place to implement the pro versus free plans. Well, most of the code. Obviously I have some time to implement the 3 months of data history limitation.
• The payment method to become a pro member is not yet implemented. Yes, this may seem like a problem, but it shouldn’t be. I wanted to push these updates live so I could finish the PayPal integration easier. The reason it shouldn’t be a problem is because every new member will have a 90 day budget pro trial, so they won’t even see the option to upgrade yet. Current members are also given a 90 day trial based on their joined date, but I may increase this soon and send out and email to let everyone know.
• I noticed an attempt to retrieve a lost password. I forgot that I hadn’t yet implemented this feature. It is now working.
• Small bug fix for OFX imports (users would likely have only seen this bug if they have two Inzolo account retrieving transactions from the same bank account)
• Updated the budget meeting report with a better layout and modified the printing style sheet to remove the header menu on print

Thanks everyone for your support. Once I get these business related items completed I will be focusing more on a number of improvements and features updates.

I found that I my wife and I review the budget, it is helpful to have notes associated with envelopes. So I’ve added this feature to Inzolo to add simple notes to envelopes. Check out this quick video tip:

I’ve made a number of updates on the allocation screen, but the most notable is the ability to set an allocation date. Consider these two problems:

1. In theory, payday for me is the 11th and the 26th. Unfortunately I get late paychecks often. So my 26th paycheck may end up coming on the 1st or 2nd of the following month. My budget plan calls for me to allocate that paycheck to the month it was in, but if I get it on the first then I could not go back in time to the previous month and allocate it.
2. I get paid on first day of each month. Generally though, since I have direct deposit, it often shows up a day or two early – especially if the 1st falls on a weekend. I don’t want to spend anything until I’ve allocated to my income to my envelopes.

So before being allowed to set the allocation date I’m sure you can see the problem with these two scenarios. Your funded and remaining amounts wouldn’t quite match up for a given month if you didn’t allocate on the right date. Now you can allocate and specify the date to be within the month you need it to be.

I have to say that my previous logo was basically borrowed from a WordPress theme header. I had no intention of keeping it very long. So I used 99designs.com to run a contest for a new logo, and finally decided on a winner. I liked simple 3 color design without the trendy gradients and such. Plus it converted well to black and white. In any case, the colors were definitely different that what I had on the site, so along with my new logo, I’ve redesigned the site. Feedback is of course always welcome.

So last night I was curious how much money I spent on groceries last month. I realized there wasn’t a report yet to give me this information. So I added this view today that shows a summary of the transactions in a given envelope or category.

(Wow, it was a hectic month. I have a perfectly good explanation for this really!)

There was an issue with OFX importing due to a previous update that has been fixed. (If it wasn’t crashing on you then your OFX file didn’t have this issue.)

Also, I’ve added a few style changes to hopefully make the transactions view look less cluttered.

One thing that was not intuitive was adding and editing transactions. To specify if a transaction was a withdrawal rather than a deposit, you would simply enter a negative number. That is no longer the case. No there is a radio button to select whether the transaction is a deposit or a withdrawal. I’m hoping this is more intuitive for everyone. Of course if all you do is import transactions, this a moot point.

I’ve also added asterisks to mark required fields.

A new feature has been added to undo transaction assignments. Once a transaction has been assigned to an envelope it cannot be edited or deleted. In can however be "undone". If you undo an "Income Allocation" transaction it will simply move the amount back to the unallocated income box. If you undo a transaction, it will move back to the unassigned transactions view. From there you can edit or delete the transaction if that is what you wish to do.