I cannot figure out a way to not input leftover money from previous month. When you go to Edit Budget and click on available money, I want to see what I have leftover for this comings month after budgeting rather than a false number from previous incomes. I even cleared data and added an account. Does anyone know how to delete previous income months leftovers and instead make it more accurate and focus on this coming month?
I’m not really sure I understand what you’re asking–do you mean you want your envelopes to reflect only the current month’s budget? If so, creating a Fill transaction on the first of the month, with each envelope’s instruction marked “Set”, will zero out any dollars or debits remaining and push any excess money into the Unallocated envelope. If your budget instruction is marked “Add”, it will simply add a prescribed amount to the envelope which will leave extra money there if you were over, and less than a full budget period’s amount if you were in debt, which sounds like what you don’t want to happen.
Creating a new account won’t change this, since accounts are only the “real world” location of your money. Envelopes describe how you plan to use the money, so the two aren’t interchangeable.
If that’s not helpful, please ask again!
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First off, there are no “false numbers” from previous incomes. If your account balances are accurate and you have properly entered all income and expense transactions, then you have true numbers. They may not be the numbers you want in that moment, but they are true.
So first, are your account balances accurate? Have you recorded all your expenses to date? Are you entering Income when you receive it? Are you allocating it at that moment to envelopes or leaving it unallocated?
At the start of a new budget period, technically all your money is “leftover” from the previous month(s). Everything allocated plus anything unallocated (i.e. the sum of your account balances) is what you have available to budget with. If you want to also include the future income from the upcoming month in your budget then that’s a reason to create an additional account, and I have detailed how I do that in a previous thread: My savings are unallocated? - #8 by kschedler
Generally it’s a bad idea to clear your data and start over unless you have a really compelling reason to do so. It makes your life harder and you lose the ability to report on previous months. It’s actually a good thing to have leftover funds from last month, it means you are living within your means and building up a safety net. The only question is how you want to record it.
As detailed in that other thread, at the end of the month I move all the “leftovers” into a goal envelope named “Slush”. This leaves the monthly envelopes a “clean slate” for filling from the next month’s income. GB is designed not to count future income, though, so the “normal” way of using it is only allocating what you actually have in your accounts at the start of the month. The way I use it (and it sounds like you want to do something similar) requires several workarounds.
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