I did not add all my expenses as they happened last month, how do I go back into january and add my expenses to that month?
Also, my income varies from month to month, but we have set our income at a set average amount. Similar to the last question, how can I got back into the last month and change my income to the actual amount rather than our placeholder average amount?
Thanks!
Just enter the expenses on the date they occurred. Depending on what you have in your envelopes, their balance may go negative. This will also affect your bank account balances. So I’m not sure how you were balancing your bank accounts, but account balances in GB need to be the same as as your actual accounts. If they are, you’re good so far. If they’re not then you’ll need to make a one time bank balance adjustment. At this point don’t worry about the negative envelopes.
Now to update your income. Just allocate the difference in income, whether positive or negative in unallocated. Now from the unallocated envelope, hopefully after your income fill it’s positive, you can do envelope transfers from unallocated to the envelopes that are negative, and fill other envelopes that need to be filled to maintain your budget.
If after updating your expenses and income and you still have negative envelopes, then you’ll either need to stop spending in those envelopes until you have income to fill them or do envelope transfers from other envelopes that may have extra funds in them.
Two key takeaways after all this is first, your account balances MUST equal your actual bank account balances and second, your total bank account balances MUST equal your total envelope balances. The total envelope balance is shown on the Envelopes tab just below the “Envelopes”. The total bank accounts balance is shown on the Accounts tab just below “Accounts”.
There’s others in this forum that may very well approach this differently than I have, so they may chime in and clear up the muddy water😊
I’d like to just add one thing to this excellent suggestion–if your income changes regularly and that makes it difficult to track, don’t use “Fill from New Income” instructions. Instead, make your paycheck a transaction all by itself (that will add money to the Unallocated balance) and then “Fill from Unallocated”. Changing the total of the paycheck is then as simple as changing any other transaction; simply click it and edit the total.
Hope that helps!