Hey @anon33764741 & @daniel.cannon, now that we’re coming to the end of our first month with the targets, I wanted to share my feedback & a suggestion.
To be honest I’ve been struggling to get comfortable with the alerts, particularly with the targets being green early on in the month, when I had already spend quite a large portion of my target (& not because of the bugs).
My concern is that I’ll spend more at the beginning of the month than I can realistically save back, in order to meet my target by the end of the month. Because of the way the calculation works, the user will potentially end up being alerted that they’re not on track to meet their target too late in the month, when they have the least time to save & get back on track.
Here’s what I’d prefer to have instead:
- The user’s target is spread over the number of the days in the month. But they are allowed to spend more at the weekends & less during weekdays.
- If the user’s cumulative spend is more than their cumulative target at any point, then the alert changes to amber. If their cumulative spend is more than their monthly target, then the alert changes to red.
That would mean that I’m alerted as soon as I’m spending too much so I’ll know that I need to reduce my spending until the alert switches back to green.
I’ve modeled this in this Google Sheets spreadsheet. Once you’ve copied the file into your drive, it enables you to:
- Set a monthly target (D2)
- Select any month (D3)
- Adjust how much more the user can spend at the weekend (D4) - which automatically adjusts how much the user can spend on weekdays
- Adjust how much the user has spent on any given day (column J)
The conditional formatting on column I shows what color the target’s alert would be
& the cumulative spend, along with the cumulative target are plotted in a graph.
Obviously I’m biased but I think this model is more intuitive (I would never have guessed that the calculation was set up the way that it has been) & enables users to react more quickly when they are overspending, while also taking into account greater spending at the weekends.
How does this look?
Note This file can be viewed by anyone through the link I’ve shared, I wanted anyone in the community to be able to experiment with the model & see how different scenarios look.
I’ve set the sharing on this file to view only so you’ll need to copy it into your drive, in order to edit it. If you are unable to do so for any reason, just let me know.