I am new to goodbudget and I am very confused. I created my budget that I am happy with and followed the video instructions. I filled my envelopes and set them to do so every month (like the person in the video).
When I created the account, it was late into the month of Jan (vs. the start of Jan) so I had already made purchases throughout Jan that I wanted to log in. I have opted to not link my Bank for personal reasons and prefer to manually do everything.
I recorded all my transactions and upon manually entering them, I would also select the envelope to fill. For example: Gas, $70, into Auto: Gas envelope.
When I finished recording all my transactions for Jan, I noticed all my amounts were “doubled”
How can I fix this? I would ideally like to keep the automatic filling of the envelopes. Wondering where I went wrong - should I NOT have selected fill envelope during the inputting of my transactions? Should I have just left that unselected so the expense would be recorded in transactions only and not envelopes?
Welcome!
It sounds like you’re using Fill for transactions, which is the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish. If you think of the envelopes like physical envelopes, you would fill them up then pull money out to spend. Just do a single Fill at the start of your budget, then enter each transaction until the next Fill and you’ll see the amount in each envelope fall.
It’s tricky to enter transactions from before you started your budget because you’ll have to also start with the account balances on the 1st, but that’s still very do-able.
Finally, you mention entering transactions without envelopes but that’s not an option. Each time you spend money it has to come from somewhere, so it needs to have an envelope assigned.
The simplified process is:
Create Accounts with accurate balances as of the day you want to start using Goodbudget. This total will be reflected as your Available amount.
Create Envelopes for your spending categories.
Create a Fill from Available instruction to distribute the money into the envelopes according to your budget/ what you expect to spend. (This doesn’t change your account balances)
Enter each transaction and assign the Account from which the money came and the Envelope it belongs to. This decrements the envelope, showing you how much you have left.
Ex:
Create Account A, balance 1500.00 on the 1st. Note that Available is now 1500.00 also.
Create Envelopes with budgets for Rent 500.00, Gas 50.00, Groceries 200.00, Utilities 100.00.
Fill from Available to match these amounts.
Buy groceries for 50.00; enter the transaction as “Aldi, 50.00, Grocery envelope, Account A”
Now notice the balance of Account A is 1450.00 and the amount left in the Grocery envelope is 150.00.
If you don’t have enough to cover the whole month at once you may need to fill your envelopes as you get income, but the process is the same.
Here I’ve Filled my envelopes by using Set to put them at their budgeted amount:
