Year-to-Year Comparison Page for Income, Expenses, and Savings

[hammerztein]

Support guidelines

• My request extends the functionality of Ocular in a meaningful way.
• I've used the search and this has not been requested before.

Description

It would be very useful to have an additional page (or view) dedicated to comparing income, expenses, and savings across different years.

Currently, it’s difficult to easily see how financial categories evolve over time. For example, I would like to compare my salary in 2020 vs 2025 to understand how much my income has increased, or compare expense categories (rent, groceries, subscriptions, etc.) to see which costs have grown the most.

Solution

Add a new “Year Comparison” page or mode where users can:

• Select two years (later possibility more than comparison between just the 2 years) to compare (e.g., 2020 vs 2025).
• Compare: Income, expenses and calculated savings (like it is on the main page of the dashboard, but only for selected years)
• View results visually (bar charts, line charts, or side-by-side tables).
• See absolute differences and/or percentage changes between selected years.

This would allow users to quickly identify:

• Salary growth over time
• Which expenses have increased the most
• How savings rate has changed year-to-year

What are alternatives?

Expose an API endpoint so that more technically advanced users could hit that endpoint with self-hosted dashboard, even though this approach seems to be more complex (for the end-user)

Additional context

This feature would be especially helpful for:

• Tracking salary growth and career progression
• Identifying lifestyle inflation or rising cost categories
• Long-term financial planning and budgeting

If helpful, the comparison could reuse existing yearly summary data and visual components already present in the app.

[simonwep]

Very, very nice idea! I can definitely see this as a feature :) Holidays are over but I'll put it on the v2.4 milestone for now and see when this could be added. It's a tad more work, but this should be feasibly and make a nice independent, new module!

[hammerztein]

Great thank you very much! I wish I could contribute and help out with the load since this app solves exactly what I've been looking for, but unfortunately I lack knowledge of VueJS/TS, Im only learning ReactJS and still in the JS phase.

[simonwep]

Hey @hammerztein, no big deal! I appreciate your input and idea :) In my day-to-day work I have little time left for in-depth feature development and over the years I started to do less and less of the kind of programming I initially started with. So I'm happy to implement such a feature if it sounds fun to :)

Wish you lot's of luck in your journey though, I can highly recommend checking out VueJS - although the job markets still prefers React developers. I worked with both but find VueJS much, much easier to start with as reactivity is in plain sight, in React all is encapsulated by the framework making it a tad more difficult to wrap your hand around. I even wrote a litte re-implementation of VueJS's core reactivity for educational purpose back at my last work.

I'd also recommend straight up skipping plain JS as it's just TS without all the typings and except for legacy code-bases or scripts it's not worth learning all the quirks of it (and there are oh so many, at least not at the beginning.