I freelance and get paid in weird/irregular increments and I just want to use GoodBudget to track my expenses so I can know how much I’m spending per month but I’m not interested in filling in every time I get paid.
Is there any way customize the app to work this way? Currently all my envelopes are negative and they show “all time” balances, not monthly balances of my spending. I’d prefer to see a monthly view of my expenses.
If I understand your question, I think the answer is to create a recurring monthly “Fill from Unallocated” with each envelope being given a “Set” instruction to reset to the budgeted amount on the 1st. Your Unallocated balance will be very negative since you’re not recording income, but your monthly expenses vs. budget will be accurate.
Does that help?
Cool! How do I do that? 
Can you explain the process for achieving that?
From the web version, click Fill Envelopes and change to Fill from Unallocated. Schedule the Fill to occur monthly on the first, and next to each envelope click “Set”. It will add enough money to make the balance of the envelope equal to its budget and will recur every month on the first.
Hope that helps!
I think that almost worked. It says that it’s pending now and all my envelopes are still in the red… I set it for November 1st when I first started using Goodbudget thinking it would fill the envelopes for January too. There’s also a place where I can click “record now”, which I’m not entirely sure what that does.
I did what you said though. I basically just want things to not rollover and to not see “red” every time I look at the app. What am I doing wrong?
When you schedule recurring transactions, the next one will always appear as a Pending transaction to remind you that it’s coming up. “Record Now” just forces the transaction to occur today rather than at the scheduled future date, but it doesn’t change the schedule for future occurrences.
It sounds like the easiest thing to do would be to “Record Now” to cover January, then adjust the next scheduled occurrence (in your future transactions) to happen on February 1. That will start resetting the budget each month.
Unfortunately January will still be off since the reset is happening near the end of the month, but future months should give you a clear picture of your spending a month at a time.
Hope that helps!
