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Track budget

Money management is simple. All you need to do is spend less money than you earn. This rule is the same for everyone. To do this you need a plan if you don’t you will fail.

Personal Finances offers an easy and effective budgeting module that presents your budget both numerically and visually.

Once the budget is set, Personal Finances will calculate your income and expenses and compare them to what you have planned to spend during a week, month, or a year. The green bar lets you instantly see how much over or under the planned budget you are.

Overview

Budget overview

  1. Click here to open the budgeting module.
  2. The different budget items you have created are displayed here
  3. The monthly detail is displayed here
  4. Click here to edit the selected budget item.

Budget optionsSetting up a Budget Item

  1. Click add to open create budget dialog
  2. Type in the name you want to use
  3. Enter the amount you are budgeting for the period you have chosen.
  4. Pick the set up items you want for the item you are budgeting for.
  5. Select the period you wish to track
  6. Uncheck this box if you want to run this budget indefinitely.
  7. Use the picker to selected the category you want to use. You can use the same feature in the next field to select items to exclude.

To Accumulate to Not to Accumulate

There are two ways that the budget can be set up. When a budget is setup without the accumulate option selected, each period stands alone and is not impacted by a surplus or deficit in a preceding period (See Example 1). When it is set up with the accumulate option selected, any surplus or deficit will be carried forward to the next period (See Example 2)

Budget example 1

Working with your budget Example 1

This budget view is not cumulative

  1. Detail window shows the daily budget variance position
  2. This shows where the budget was overspent in a particular day
  3. Shows the individual transactions for the day.

Note that the amount “available” in January 29 is still shown as $50 despite the overspend in January 28.

Budget example 2

Working with your budget Example 2

  1. Detail window shows the daily budget variance position
  2. This shows where the budget was overspent in a particular day
  3. Shows the individual transactions for the day.

Note that the amount “available” in January 29 is shown as $21 due to the overspend in January 28.