Finance — structure money decisions

A finance-tree is a document for thinking about money as a hierarchy. Nodes carry amounts — recurring rates or one-off sums — and roll up bottom-up. A node’s sign flips its whole subtree, so a “Costs” branch subtracts without you ever typing a negative number. The tree is the source; the math compiles the totals; reports are the artefacts you export.

This tour uses the studio-budget finance-tree in the demo project meridian-ops (seed it with wb smoke showcase).

Table of contents

  1. The tree
  2. Sign flips the subtree
  3. Reports compile out of it
  4. Where to go next

The tree

Open the finance-tree and you get a master-detail editor — the tree on the left, the selected node’s detail on the right. The studio-budget example rolls a studio’s month up from two branches: Revenue and Costs. The top shows the net, and a switcher recomputes it per day / week / month / year.

Finance — the studio-budget tree with its net rollup

Sign flips the subtree

Select the Costs node and it carries sign: −1 — everything under it is entered as a positive amount (salaries 18,000/mo, infra 203/mo, …) and subtracted automatically. A record can be a recurring rate (with a period) or a one-time sum on a date (the €5,000 legal setup). You never juggle minus signs.

Finance — the Costs node with "negative (flips subtree)" ticked

Reports compile out of it

The Report button runs a processor over the tree and writes the result through another kind: table → a sheet (period matrix), series → a chart (a time series per node), assessment → a markdown write-up. Same source, different compiled artefact — inline, or saved as its own document.

Finance — generating an assessment report from the tree

Here the assessment processor turns the numbers into a written read — bottom line, main drivers, one-time items — but the same dialog will just as happily compile a sheet matrix or a chart series from the identical tree.

Where to go next

  • The node/value model, the year invariant and the calc rules: finance-tree spec.
  • The finance_* tools let an agent build the tree, set values, recalc and generate reports — see How-tos.
  • Editing the tree alongside chat: Cortex tour.