I am creating a budgeting system. I need to know the current balance in each of several categories. One of the categories is Office Supplies. Over time funds are added to (put money in to increase the balance) or removed from it (office supplies are purchased from a vendor reducing the balance).
As purchases are made or funds added, my users need to know the current balance available to them to purchase supplies.
Also, once in a while, a correction must be made to a previously entered amount. Such as when someone transposes two numbers in the Amount field. The correction must percolate through the system in order for the current balance to be correct.
If this is possible, I would prefer to do it in formula language as my Lotus script isn't as good as it should be. I've been banging my head against the wall on this but not making any progress. My head will appreciate any assistance.
Although this question is way to broad to really be answerable I will try to outline a solution.
I assume you have one document for every "purchase" that is made. This document has a field for the "category", probably a subject field for the "name" of your purchase and of course an amount. You might also have a body field for further details.
That way when something changes one can simply modify the document to fix this.
In addition I would create a "budget" document that only contains 2 Fields: budget category and budget amount.
Now you create a categorized view that contains both of the document types and has a column with the property "Show totals" enabled.
The formula is something like:
@If( Form = "Budget"; BudgetAmount; -1 * Amount )
Like that the Budget gets a positive value and the purchases are negative. Then every category shows the available amount in the category header.