Filling an envelope from cash

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Hi: this is my second time with GoodBudget. I am ashamed to say that the first time I just got frustrated and quit. I am going to be more persistent now so I will be asking a lot of questions :grinning:. The question I have for the community is that I have an envelope that I want to fill with cash from the ATM because I pay the charge with cash. But there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this. The only way to fill envelopes is from Income or Unallocated. And I already transferred the money from my Checking to the Cash Account. So filling the envelope from unallocated seems like it won’t track the cash expenditure?

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Welcome back!
Your Unallocated balance includes ALL of your accounts, so transferring money from one to another won’t change anything on the envelope side. So long as your Cash and Checking accounts are both tracked in Goodbudget, they’re both included in Unallocated.
Since you want to put some of that in a Cash envelope (I’m assuming it’s just for small items you won’t put into a budget category), you will actually fill from Unallocated. If there’s not enough there, then you’ll need to transfer it from other envelopes.
If instead you plan to use cash for, say, coffee and you consider that a “dining out” expense, then you won’t need an cash envelope. You’d just enter the coffee in the dining envelope with the Cash account designated as the source of the funds.
Does that help?

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I helps to think of envelopes and accounts separately. Your accounts are just the sources of your money and the envelopes are your plan for spending your money. I.e. you allocate $20 of your money to an envelope, you don’t fill an envelope with “cash” (or “checking”, or “savings”, etc). The envelope doesn’t know or care where the money comes from.

This is why when you record an expense transaction, you have to specify both the envelope and the account. It’s the expense that knows you paid in cash, not the envelope.

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Yes. Thank you.