[Feature] Ability to "hold" money via the API

[jat255]

Verified feature request does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

💻

• Would you like to implement this feature?

Pitch: what problem are you trying to solve?

When importing from other tools (such as financier.io or nYNAB), their default strategy is that income gets assigned to the "next month", in that it is available to budget in the month after the income is received, in order to encourage people to live one month behind and stop any paycheck to paycheck behavior.

When migrating budgets from a tool like this to Actual, this results in the monthly "available to budget" amounts being off, since all income goes to the month it is received in Actual. At first glance, it looks like something happened with the import to make the values all be off, but this can be corrected by clicking on the 'to budget' amount, then "hold for next month", then pressing enter for every month. For a large budget (mine goes back to 2015), this has to be done many many times.

Describe your ideal solution to this problem

I would suggest a new API function named setBudgetForNextMonth(month, amount: optional). If no amount is given, it will default to whatever the current "To budget" amount is. If an amount is given, it will behave identically to the UI workflow of (1) clicking on to budget, (2) clicking "hold for next month", and (3) entering an amount.

(I checked that I'd be open to implementing this feature, but I am a very novice javascript programmer...)

Teaching and learning

Add documentation of the new API function in the API docs

[github-actions]

✨ Thanks for sharing your idea! ✨

This repository uses lodash style issue management for enhancements. That means enhancement issues are automatically closed. This doesn’t mean we don’t accept feature requests, though! We will consider implementing ones that receive many upvotes, and we welcome contributions for any feature requests marked as needing votes (just post a comment first so we can help you make a successful contribution).

The enhancement backlog can be found here: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues?q=label%3A%22needs+votes%22+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc+

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