I would like to know if it is possible to allocate some expenses to another month in which it occurred. For instance, most of the time my first groceries of the month happen a few days before the month starts. Or my insurance is issuing a refund on the 3rd for an expense that occurred on the previous 28th. I know I can cheat on the transaction dates, but this method is not clean and that would be great if I could force GB to allocate an expense to the next or previous month even if it occurred on another month. Thanks in advance !
Because Goodbudget is structured as if it were real, cold cash in real envelopes, there’s no inherent way to use money from earlier or later envelopes.
You CAN adjust your older Fill instructions so that past transactions can be correctly dated and current envelopes will be accurately filled, but that does require a few extra steps. It all depends on the level of detail/accuracy you require.
Some other suggestions might be to change your monthly budget to begin a few days before the 1st; that way you would capture your grocery spending in the month it represents. You might also try using weekly grocery envelopes, holding off on your grocery fill until later in the month, or just budgeting for end-of-the-month grocery expenditures even though you’re not eating the food you buy until the following month. Finally, you might create a second, Annual or Goal envelope to “hold for groceries”. You could use this like an “Unallocated”, but strictly for food. You’d transfer money from that envelope into your regular grocery envelope at the end of the month before you go shopping. That’s quite a bit of extra work, but it could be helpful if you run a very tight budget and don’t want that tempting green bar in your Grocery envelope all month long.
Hopefully something here might help!
GB doesn’t treat budget periods as first-class objects. “Last month”, “this month”, “next month” are not separate buckets of money which you can give or take money to/from. There is only the “Groceries” bucket/envelope/category. The date of a transaction really only affects the reports and a handful of calculations that GB performs (e.g. the green bar).
I have found it best to simply record every transaction on the date when it occurred. It’s easier to reconcile and it all evens out over time. I usually purchase groceries on a Saturday. Even if most of the groceries I purchased the last Saturday of February will be consumed in March, the expense occurred in February and gets counted as February. The same thing will happen again near the end of most months so it all balances out in the long run.