Account Forecast

Account Forecast

A ledger-level view, not a business one: for each bank account, what's about to come off it, in what order, and whether the balance goes negative before it recovers.

Steps

0. Load business context

Read /media/data/Dropbox/Work/Admin/Financial/Accounting/aletheia-codex.md before anything else. It's the authoritative record of account topology and which obligations draw from which account.

1. Read the financial snapshot

Read /media/data/Dropbox/Work/Admin/Financial/Accounting/accounts.json. If more than 24 hours old, run python3 studio/collectors/gnucash_collector.py to refresh.

Key fields:

• bank_balances — current balance per account
• upcoming_all — every predicted transaction, each with date, label, amount, type (fixed, tax, draw, income, ...), and account

2. Split unattributed transactions

Some recurring items in upcoming_all have account: "Unknown" — the source data doesn't yet say which account they draw from. Pull these into a separate "unassigned" list and call them out explicitly. Don't guess which account they belong to and don't fold them into any account's running balance — a wrong guess is worse than an honest gap.

3. Group and project, per account

For each named account (not "Unknown"):

• Start from its current balance (bank_balances).
• Sort its transactions from upcoming_all by date, ascending.
• Walk forward: income/inflow types add to the running balance, everything else subtracts.
• Record the running balance after each transaction.

4. Flag insufficient funds

Any point where an account's running balance goes negative is a flag. For each flagged account, report:

• The date it first goes negative
• The transaction that tips it over
• The shortfall amount (how far negative)
• Whether it recovers later in the window (and when)

5. Output

Lead with a one-line summary: which accounts (if any) run short, and by when. This is the part that actually matters — put it first, not buried in tables.

Then, per account, a table:

Mark the row where balance goes negative clearly (e.g. ⚠ SHORTFALL).

Close with the unassigned-transactions list from step 2, if any, so nothing silently falls through the cracks.

Be direct. If an account is going to run short, say so plainly and say when.