Setting up a budget takes four steps: what kind of budget, which categories are in it, which of them carry unspent money forward, and how often it resets. Financio fills in your starting amounts from what you actually spend, so you're editing real numbers rather than starting from zero.
Starting setup
Go to Planning › Budget. If your household has no budget yet, the setup steps appear straight away.
Go to Planning › Budget and tap Set Up Your Budget.
Members with a Read Only role can't create a budget. See Understanding Roles.
Step 1. What type of budget?
- Basic Categories. Your top-level categories only. Quick to set up and easy to stay on top of.
- Detailed Categories: subcategories too, so Housing can be split into Rent, Insurance and Maintenance.
- Needs / Wants / Savings, the 50/30/20 approach: your categories grouped into three buckets.
Budget Types goes through what each one looks like day to day. Picking a type here isn't permanent in spirit, but changing it later means starting the budget again, so it's worth a moment's thought.
Step 2. Choose your categories
Everything is switched on to begin with. Switch off anything you don't want to plan for: it still shows in reports, it just doesn't get a budget line.
- Income is always included and can't be switched off.
- Transfers between your accounts are excluded automatically.
- Select all and Deselect all are at the top if you'd rather start from the other end.
- On a Detailed budget, switching a parent off takes its subcategories with it, and switching a subcategory on brings its parent back.
On a Needs / Wants / Savings budget, your categories arrive pre-sorted into the three buckets. Financio guesses from the category name, so check them and move anything that's landed in the wrong place, Budget Types explains how.
Step 3. Rollover
Every category you picked is listed with a switch, all off to begin with. Switching one on means its unspent budget carries into the next period instead of disappearing.
It's worth turning on for spending that arrives in lumps: Travel, Gifts, Car Maintenance, Medical, where a quiet month is really saving up for a loud one. It's also how you budget monthly for a once-a-year bill like rego or insurance; Annual and Irregular Expenses walks through that. Leave it off for the everyday categories you want to start fresh each period, like Groceries.
Overspending carries too: a rollover category that goes over starts the next period behind, which is the point. It stops a blowout quietly disappearing at the end of the month.
On a Detailed budget you'll see your subcategories here rather than their parents, since that's where the amounts live. Nothing here is permanent: the same switches live in budget settings afterwards, see Adjusting Amounts.
Step 4. Budget options
- Name: "Household budget", "Our plan", whatever you like. Leave it blank and it becomes "My budget".
- Period: Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly, or Custom. Monthly resets on the 1st, quarterly at the start of each calendar quarter, yearly on 1 January.
- Custom: set your own cycle: every 2 months, every fortnight, and so on. You also pick the date the cycle starts from, which matters more than it looks, see Periods and Start Dates.
The summary line at the bottom tells you what you're about to create: how many categories, how often it resets, and when the current period starts.
Select Create budget and it's live immediately, with this period's spending already counted.
Where your starting amounts come from
You don't have to type an amount for every category. Financio seeds each one from your average spending over the last 6 completed months, scaled to your period, so a quarterly budget starts at three times the monthly average.
Categories you've never spent in start at $0. Everything is editable from the budget page afterwards, and each amount keeps its average as a one-tap suggestion. See Adjusting Amounts.