A budget sets a spending target for each of your categories, then shows what you've actually spent against it. Where a report tells you what happened, a budget tells you whether what happened was the plan.
Your household has one budget. Everyone who can see the household sees the same budget and the same numbers, so there's a single version of the plan rather than one per person.
The three columns
Every budget line has the same three numbers:
- Budget, what you decided to spend. You set this, and it stays the same from one period to the next.
- Actual, what you've spent so far in the period Financio is showing. This comes straight from your transactions.
- Remaining. Budget minus Actual. It goes red once you've spent more than you planned.
How actuals are worked out
Actuals are the sum of your transactions in the period, so a budget is only as accurate as your categorising. Two rules are worth knowing:
- Transfers between your own accounts are excluded. Moving $500 from Everyday to Savings isn't spending, so it never counts against a category.
- A category includes everything beneath it. If you budget for Housing and a transaction is categorised as Rent, that spending shows against Housing. Splitting a transaction across categories counts each split against its own category.
Nothing you do on the budget page changes a transaction, editing a budgeted amount only moves the target.
Income
The budget also tracks income, so it can tell you whether your plan actually fits your pay. Financio fills in an expected figure from your average income over the last 6 completed months, and you can replace it with your own number at any time. See Adjusting Amounts.
That gives you the Left to budget line: expected income minus everything you've budgeted. If you budget more than you earn, it flips to Overbudgeted in red.
Budgets or goals?
They answer different questions, and plenty of households use both:
- A budget is the whole picture, period after period: every category, resetting each month (or quarter, or year).
- A goal is one thing you're working towards or watching: a holiday fund, paying off a card, keeping Dining under $200 for a specific window.
If you want a recurring per-month cap on a category, that's the budget. If you want a one-off window with a finish line, that's a goal. See Understanding Goals.
Rollover
Most categories are meant to reset: a fresh $900 for groceries every month, whether or not you came in under last time. Some aren't: travel, gifts and car repairs happen in lumps, and a month with no spending is really just saving up for the month that has it.
Categories you mark as rollover carry their unspent budget into the next period. Budget $150 a month for Travel, spend nothing for three months, and the fourth period has $600 to play with. Overspending carries the same way, so a category that goes over starts the next period behind.
You choose which categories roll over during setup, and can change your mind any time from budget settings. See Adjusting Amounts. Anything carried in is marked ↻ on the budget page.
Rollover is also how you budget monthly for a bill that arrives once a year. See Annual and Irregular Expenses.
What a budget doesn't do yet
- Amounts don't vary by period. The number you set for Groceries applies to every period; paging back and forth changes the actuals, not the targets.
- Carried amounts aren't banked. Switching rollover off drops whatever a category had carried; it starts the next period on its budgeted amount alone.
Who can change it
Members with a Read Only role can see the budget and page through periods, but can't create one, edit amounts, or delete it. See Understanding Roles.