One of the things that irks me with many of the /r/dataisbeautiful things with Sankey diagrams is somewhere on the line there's "one big bucket" that loses all of the data behind it.

In my own budgeting, my direct deposit can go to multiple accounts - and I do. Part goes to my "allowance" account and part goes to my "savings" account. Other people have alimony, child support, or similar withholdings from their wages.

So the question I have for the example budget on the page, can you have the freelance work go directly to savings? Or 300 be taken out of salary and go to child support without hitting the main account? If you have two incomes in a household and the breakdown is "two personal accounts and one shared account - each person contributes 10% to their own and 10% to the other person's personal account, and 80% to the shared account," can that be shown that way rather than one "main" account?

Nice use of Sankey. Here's an ask or thought, I would like to feed this automatically with my spend data from my bank account. So I can export a csv that has time-date, entity, amount (credit/debit) - would be great if it could spit this out by category (where perhaps an llm could help with this task). I would then like flow to be automated monthly or perhaps quarterly with major deltas (per my definition) then pushed to me via alerts. So this isn't so much active budget management but passive nudging where the shape of my spend changes something I don't look at now but would like to.

I love Sankey diagrams and don't understand why major personal finance apps like Mint, Quicken, etc., (and corporate ERPs for that matter) don't provide them out of the box. I plan to try this out for a budget, but want to see my actual expenses this way as well.

I use Sankey (in Python) to plot out multiple retirement pathways with ramification on various taxes and draindown of funds especially if you can display three or more variants side-by-side (or in my case, stacked viewers).

It is a great graphing tool!!!

Thank you for including a relatively straightforward Privacy Policy:

https://www.budgetflow.cc/privacy_policy

and ToS:

https://www.budgetflow.cc/terms_of_service

Wanted to drop a note that I have been using Sankey for the exact same use case for a couple years now. I use Google Charts and about 40 lines of JS code, then I export the SVG (or paste a screenshot) into my presentation slides. It is a bit tedious and error prone process but works great. There are a few bugs on Google Charts Sankey implementation as well that makes so that the order you enter items impact the visualization layout.

In my case, we do project level budget and it has to flow upstream so I need to ensure that the numbers add up. From my preliminary test, it does not look like I can do that with this tool (yet?). I want to enter the leaf / most granular level numbers and then do the group hierarchy and not have to enter every number from top to bottom.

I’ve been working on a personal finance app for the last few months that’s in beta now that’s doing something similar.

It’s essentially a personal finance app plugged with Plaid, autocatergorization and whatnot, and the dashboard automatically dynamically updates a Sankey chart of your monthly spending.

Example https://imgur.com/a/olpW97s

Shameless plug, https://www.conquest.money/

I really like the idea. Having a bird's eye view of money flow is central to building and maintaining a strategy. I have been looking for this kind of tool for years, and currently am using a spreadsheet for this, as nothing worked for me. This simple diagram is so much clearer. But you need to refine the UX, which is barely usable at the moment: it took me a few minutes to understand how to change the numbers. I am still not sure how to add pockets. The name pocket itself is not very descriptive to me, but I am not sure how I would call them. Maybe just « entity », and have a few variations of them (income, accounts, etc). I would need pockets that take a percentage of another one, such as tax withholding. This feedback is not structured, but I really like this idea and hope it will help

Thanks for sharing this. I've never seen Sankey diagrams used for budgeting, but it feels very intuitive!

I'm wondering about how budgeting tools like this help with planning vs budget auditing? Or maybe what I'm thinking of has a different name?

When I think of budget planning, I'd like a tool to tell me what would happen to Y if I did X (e.g. how would buying a car today [purchase plus recurring costs] effect my maximum home down payment in 12 months)? Or if I want A, what can do to B, C, and D to make it happen (e.g. if I want to save for a trip to New Zealand next year, how could adjust my budget to reach my goal)?

I'm not sure if what I'm describing is planning or not, but I can imagine visualizations helping with it!

Very pretty! One thing I noticed is that when you hover over a budget item, it highlights the source and the destination of that item, but only a distance of one away. I think it would be useful to highlight items all the way to the root and leaves, so you can see where the money is actually coming from and going to. For example, if I hover over "Retirement Savings", it only highlights the "Savings" item. But I want to see where that money is eventually coming from: from the Main Account, which is fed by Freelance and Salary!

Where does the data get stored?

Why is there no company / legal entity / contact information on the home page?

It's an interesting idea, but if you want budget information about people, you need to excel at being above board.

This is a neat view into budgeting. What are your future plans? Will you have tools that help see how the different pockets grow over time?

found a free google sheets (local) add-on for this too: https://github.com/brucemcpherson/SankeySnip?tab=readme-ov-f...

I'm not sure the diagram helps in any way, certainly in the use case on the main page.

The "main account" is just thrown in to provide some sort of intermediate step. In most people's cases, it's just about income and outgoings.

It's cool to see [PicoCSS](https://picocss.com/) in the wild.. I'm playing with the app and it looks great so far!

Clicking on the settings icon shows a "Not Found" error.

This looked like an awesome product... until I signed up, then it made no sense using it. UX is nonsense.

Hope it improves though so thumbs up

This is pretty cool. I manually put my budget for a month into a sankey generator just to see last year. Nice to see someone run that idea a little further.

I love this idea! I was vaguely thinking of making something like this for myself but I’m very glad someone else has done the hard work. Getting started now!

Is there a way to see how the money changes over time or do I need to work that out myself. Like if a bucket is filling up month by month?

I've been looking for something like this for a while :) Looking forward to trying it out!

Small bug on the main page: the footer is duplicated when the logo at top left is clicked.

It's nice,would there be a way to combine monthly, weekly etc. based on the logic of the cost.

I seriously want this for ERP

Strange, chart doesn't load in Safari 15.6, no error message in console.

Looks very nice, but animations are very laggy for me (M1 Mac, Chrome Beta)

I like it. I use something similar in some code that i've developed

It's wrong.

    3500 in -> go to parents house -> 1000 into bitcoin
                                   ->  100 into speculative coins on bull market, or making sorts in bear markets
                                   ->  300 into gold
                                   ->  600 to stocks with dividend growth
                                   ->  400 to real state or REITs
                                   ->  200 to speculative stocks
                                   ->  500 to your bank account (with some interest)
                                   ->  200 to cash, for those days you go out of your parents home
                                   ->  200 to presents for your parents

If your parents complain, give them the money of the presents, part from the bank account or from the speculative stuff, to silence them.

Repeat and reinvest benefits into non correlative actives.

Once you reach a balance of ((90 years - your age) x 12 months) * (3500 * N), maybe you can leave your parents home (not mandatory), and try to race with your yearly benefices, against the *real* inflation. N is a magic number, to cover the compound inflation during all those years, without penalizing too much the first years.

Maybe next year 3500/month is still ok, but in 30 years it won't.

If you're over 70's, do not follow this advice, take the 3500 and live la vida loca each month. Like in the "latin" song from the country that did never ever speak "latin".

Have a nice day.

Now seriously: The real important stuff when working with budgets, is to "see" the "estimate Vs real" thing.

hey man. This is dope. Do you have an email I could reach out to? Im working on something in this space & would love to collaborate on something with you.

Getting a 504. RIP

Edit: Back alive :)

This is so cool! I actually spent the last 3 hours after finding this creating a personal budget for the first time in my life. Basically I just added all my expenses using Claude.ai to help me create good pockets (could be cool integration?). That gave me a good overview of what I was spending way too much on. I especially liked the part where I could have my surplus automatically going into a savings bucket. I realized that my savings would not grow as quickly as I was hoping with my current spend, and the visualization really helped me understand where most of my expenses were going. After that I basically just optimized all my expenses until I got to the savings level I was comfortable with.

So yeah I'm not sure how this is different from other budgeting apps since I never used them, but this was the one that made me actually do that. Thank you so much.

Nice use of that diagram type I love it

Looks like some useless fancy-looking stuff for managers.

does this have a selfhosted version ?

You need a random number generator called “Having Kids” and another one labeled “Divorce”. This would complete the simulation.

/s

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