MoneyDance Monthly Budget Bars

WARNING! As of 1/1/2024 I am no longer maintaining this code. It is freely available for someone else to pick up and maintain.

For help using this extension see the Wiki.

Monthly Budget Bars is an extension for the Moneydance Personal Finance app to display progress bars about how well you are meeting your monthly spending goals. The main reason to use this extension instead of the built in Moneydance budget bars is that this extension properly handles negative budget amounts as well as being able to display additional information about each category you choose to display.

Monthly Budget Bars is a companion to to my Monthly Budget Editor and Monthly Budget Report extensions that not only allow for negative budget amounts but also allow for easy entry and reporting of budget amounts and spending.

Installation

1. Either build the source code or download the latest release.

2. Follow Moneydance's official documentation to install extensions.
   Use the Add From File... option to load the budgetbars.mxt file.

3. The extension has not yet been audited and signed by The Infinite Kind, so you'll get a warning asking you if you really want to continue loading the extension, click Yes to continue loading the extension.

4. You can now add the extension to the Summary Page by going to File:Preferences in Moneydance and then clicking on the "Summary Page" tab and adding Monthly Budget Bars to the left or right pane.

5. Now switch away from the Summary page (You can click Reminders) then return to the Summary Page to force the widget to be displayed. See the Wiki if you need help configuring the Monthly Budget Bars extension.

Build

1. Clone the repository to your local system:

git clone https://github.com/jerrymjones/MonthlyBudgetBars.git <localfolder>

2. Initialize the folder structure for building. The following command needs to be executed in src/ i.e. cd <localfolder>/src:

ant init

3. Download the Moneydance Developer's Kit and extract it to a local folder on your system. Once extracted, copy-paste lib/extadmin.jar and lib/moneydance-dev.jar into the <localfolder>/lib folder:

cd tmp/
curl -O https://infinitekind.com/dev/moneydance-devkit-5.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf moneydance-devkit-5.1.tar.gz
cp moneydance-devkit-5.1/lib/* ... 

4. Generate a key pair (as required by Moneydance) to sign your locally built extension. You will be prompted for a passphrase that is used to encrypt the private key file. Your new keys will be stored in the priv_key and pub_key files. The command needs to be executed in <localfolder>/src:

ant genkeys

5. Build the extension from <localfolder>/src:

ant budgetbars

6. Install the extension per the installation instructions above using <localfolder>/dist/budgetbars.mxt as the file to load.