I convinced my daughter (who is a student and co-rent an apartment with a friend) to use GoodBudget.
Regarding all shared costs related to the apartment (common groceries, electricity etc.), they track it in another way (via an app called Tricount) and they balance things out once a month.
The problem is that the balance for Tricount is made over all categories, and when my daughter wants to check on goodbudget where she stands as regards one of her categories she cannot.
I’ll go with an example. Let’s say my dauhter is called Julie and her friend is Emma and there’s only 2 categories in Julie’s GB : electricity (monthly budget for Julie: 25€) and groceries (monthly budget for Julie: 40€)
Julie pays for the electricity bill (50€) for the month: she books it in GB in full and also indicates it in Tricount.
She also pays one for groceries (30 €) and also indicates it in both GB and Tricount.
Emma pays 3 times the groceries for a total of 45€, and she indicates it in Tricount.
At the end of the month in tricount:
Julie has paid a total of 50+30 = 80€
Emma has paid for a total of 45€.
Therefore Emma is notified to pay (80-45)/2 = 17.5€ to Julie.
Julie received the money and wants to log is in GB…but then she doesn’t know how to allocate it and all the amounts for her 2 categories are naturally wrong until she allocates these 17.5€: for instance Electricity says she is 25€ over budget (she paid 50€ vs budget of 25€) and Grocery says she’s 10€ positive for Groceries (she paid 30€ vs budget of 40€).
In this case, it seems as if Julie’s total budget amount is enough, as she’s budgeted 65€/month and they’ve spent 125€ between them. Her envelopes are off because of the asynchronous nature of their payment/reimbursement scheme, but they’re ultimately holding enough.
Unfortunately the reality is that she IS overbudget in that she doesn’t have the money to spend that she’s already spent toward groceries, but she won’t have gone over in the monthly reports because of the reimbursement she’ll receive from Emma.
That reimbursement should be allocated to Julie’s Electricity budget and she should do an envelope transfer from Groceries to make up the remainder. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to account for this during the month because she won’t have the money until the settlement is finished. As for knowing how much to put where, I think she should just do her best to get her envelopes close to 0€ at the end of the month and then she can assess whether her budget is accurate for her needs.
The realistic solution might be an interpersonal one–if Julie is significantly over- or underspending during the month, perhaps she could rely on Emma to shoulder more of the burden temporarily, or vice versa.
This sounds like a situation where she won’t really be able to track her actual spending in real time because she’s sometimes buying for her housemate and sometimes her housemate is buying for her. She SHOULD be able to get accurate numbers historically though, after the Tricounts are all finished.
I’m sorry this doesn’t sound particularly helpful and I’m not even sure it all makes sense, but that’s a tough situation to manipulate into the app.