Basic Idea

Basic Idea

You have an Account which you divide up into sections. (You can only 'simulate' one account at a time)
There are three types of sub-sections that you can have in the account (called elements):
A savings element
An expense element
An allowance element
These are arranged in priority levels where the highest priority is filled before lower ones.
This allows you to have more important and less important elements. Savings elements always have the lowest priority.

Index

1. Savings Element
2. Allowance Element
3. Expense Element
4. Expense vs Allowance
5. Priority levels
6. Refreshing

1. Savings Element

A savings element represents a part of your account set apart for savings.
There must be one main savings element per account, as this is where surplus income is added, and in some cases subtracted from.
There can be other savings elements as well as the main savings element, but they are not looked at by the program when using the program to add income to the account.
Both of these two types of savings element can have money added to them and removed from them.
Note: When adding money to a savings element you are adding money to the account as a whole (increasing the balance).

2. Allowance Element

An allowance element represents an allowance given monthly for a specific purpose.
For example a food allowance is an allowance given monthly for buying food.
Note: when add to an allowance element you are adding an amount spent in that allowance, so you are reducing the amount of money in the account as a whole.

3. Expense Element

An expense element represents an expense that must be paid monthly.
For example a phone account must be paid monthly, it could be represented as an expense element.
Note: when add to an expense element you are adding an amount spent in that expense, so you are reducing the amount of money in the account as a whole.

4. Expense vs Allowance

The only difference between an expense element and an allowance element is how they look graphically. When an expense has no money left in it the 'progress bar' is green, while an allowance's bar would be red. That is an unpaid expense is 'bad' and an unused allowance is 'good'.
Note: if an expense and an allowance are on the same priority level they will be treated exactly equal. So they will be given equal share of the income to that level. As such it is recommended that you use discretion when assigning priority levels, and make important expenses have a higher priority that allowances.

5. Priority levels

The program supports having elements in different priority levels. Higher priority levels are completely filled before lower ones.
This is done so that you can prioritise what you spend money on. For example it may be more important to pay the phone bill than to spend money on jewellery, so your phone expense element would be on a higher priority level that your jewellery allowance.

6. Refreshing

The program has the functionality to 'refresh' the account. This is simple a means of semi-automatically adding income to the account without having to add income to each element individually and all the complex logic that is included with that.
What this does is it adds a set amount (set in options) to the account. This amount represents your monthly income (Note that this could also be used in any other time frame, like weekly or daily).
It is added to the highest priority level, which is filled, what is left over is added to the next priority level, until there is nothing left to pass on or we reach the main savings account.
Each element is refilled. So that the amount of money left in it is the same as it's total, and the amount spent on it is set to zero.