Income & Expense as Sankey Chart

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Socrate
Socrate Member ✭✭
edited October 2023 in Reports

The current doughnuts charts for expenses is way too simplistic and useless. The one in "Spending Category" card, or the bar charts of old. It doesn't allow for analyzing sub categories.

Idea: Introduce Sankey chart for Income & Expense. Both to replace the card in "Home > Spending by Categiory", and in Income & Expense reports.

I include this great example below, created by Visual Capitalists for businesses' NIS.

In Quicken, the Sankey chart should be collapsible and expandable. Start with just two bars in the middle, income & expense, then with +/- controls expand one level down the categories hierarchy to either side (left or right), each of Income and Expense into subcategories.

The beauty of the Sankey charts is that is allows to visually depict proportions for multiple levels of a tree-like data structure.

More examples here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/big-tech-revenue-profit-by-company/

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Comments

  • keith.and.meliss
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    I absolutely love this idea, and in fact, have a recent love affair with sankey charts. I made this one (removed amounts so its just relative) to give a review of family finances at the end of the year when prepping for tax season. I'm iterating on the idea and making another for monthly cash flow.

    METHOD:

    Currently I export a expenses report from all accounts broken down by Tag and then Category (not sub category). Then I augment the data with incomes, including available credit and loans. These collectively go into "funds" or "budget" in the middle and then split out into the tags, then categories.

    Once the data is collected, hop over to https://sankeymatic.com/build/ and paste the data into the box, adjust the page size to 2750 x 2125 and poof.

    It helps my brain.

    It would be sublime to be able to generate these on-demand.

  • Socrate
    Socrate Member ✭✭
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    Indeed we could have this for

    1. P&L
    2. Cash-Flow
    3. Balance/Sheet (Assets & Liabilities)

    Hope more Quicken users will upvote this proposal!

  • Jeff76
    Jeff76 Member ✭✭✭
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    I was looking at Sankey charts the other day, and thought that would make a great chart for Quicken to add to depict income streams and expense outflows in a very impactful way.

  • Jeff76
    Jeff76 Member ✭✭✭
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    Question for Quicken developers, is Quicken considering the use of Sankey charts for income/expense reporting?

  • mattc2
    mattc2 Member ✭✭
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    Sankey charts are going viral for tracking expenses on social media. Quicken could get quite the marketing boost if people start posting their Sankeys on reddit (like for Monarch).

  • Jeff76
    Jeff76 Member ✭✭✭
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    Is there any further thought from the Quicken development team to upgrade their report graphics?

    A Sankey chart to see various income streams vs expense streams would be a useful and great enhancement.

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
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    Is there any further thought from the Quicken development team to upgrade their report graphics? 

    @Jeff76 I obviously can't speak for the Quicken development team, but I'd note that they never post directly on this forum. The only information we get from them is when Idea threads like this change status, first to Under Consideration, and then to either Planned or Not Planned. But this Idea thread currently has received only 9 votes, which means it has not yet been forwarded to the development team for consideration; a Quicken Mac Idea needs to reach 30 votes for that.

    That said, it doesn't mean that the development team doesn't have and implement their own ideas about how to improve the program. There is a different Idea thread requesting the ability to create charts as well as reports, and that Idea is a "Planned" status. So it's possible when they implement what they are planning for reports, depending on what the code libraries they use offer, they might offer multiple types of reports. You might want to add a comment asking for Sankey charts in that thread; the developers will often read the comments in an Idea thread when implementing a new feature.

    Also, there's another Idea thread seeking "More Graphs and Graph types for Q Mac" which encompasses snaky and other typers of charts. That Idea thread is up to 22 votes, so you might want to add your vote and comments to that thread, as it might reach the critical 30 votes to be forwarded to the developers for consideration sooner than this one.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • Jeff76
    Jeff76 Member ✭✭✭
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    Thanks @jacobs, I will post to both threads. I wonder if the lack of votes could be related to people not knowing what a Sankey chart looks like or what it depicts?