I’m very confused on rollover. I am not scheduling my fills because I don’t have a buffer yet. How do I get the leftover amounts to rollover each period? And what is a period? If I have $25 left in groceries for the week, does that rollover on Monday? And if I have $25 leftover in my phone bill for the month, when does that rollover? If they don’t automatically rollover, then where does the leftover go?
Hi and welcome! The simple answer is that without any scheduled fills, your money will just remain in each envelope until you spend it down, at which point you’ll need to add more. Just like a physical envelope, once you put money in it will stay there until you “take it out” (spend it or move it to a different envelope).
The period is however you define it–many people budget against either their paydays or their expected expenses. For example, if you get paid weekly and want most of your budgeting to fall on that cycle, you could choose a weekly budget and plan Fills for the start of each new week. If you’d rather budget around monthly expenses like rent/mortgage, car payments, utility bills, etc. then a monthly budget might be a better fit, but that’s ultimately up to you! Whatever budget period you choose, you can still make your Fills as often or infrequently as suits you, (scheduled or one-offs)–the difference is in the green representation of how you’re spending against what you’d planned to spend. You could even have several different fills if, for example, you and a partner get paid different amounts on different days, or you have income from multiple sources and want to budget them individually.
Unless you specifically instruct them to, the envelopes will neither refill nor reset on their own. If you’re not in a place yet to fill a month’s worth of envelopes (or whatever your budget period is), then you’ll just need to prioritize your envelopes each time you have money to fill so that there’s enough to cover your needs. With each Fill, you can either Add a specific, fixed amount of money (a true “rollover”), Set the envelope to a certain balance regardless of how much was in it to begin with, or Add 0.00 to be sure the envelope remains the same as it was before the Fill.
And finally, your money to budget is the aggregate amount in all your tracked Accounts. Goodbudget “piles it up” in the Available envelope and you distribute it from there, so if you were to clear out an envelope, delete it, or move money around then any leftover would just go back into your Available envelope to be redistributed as you see fit. One important note: Available will not automatically adjust for any envelopes that are overspent (“in the red”) so to be sure you don’t overdraw, always be sure your Available is 0.00 or higher, and none of your envelopes show a negative balance. (If you do have to dip below, then do a Fill from Available or an Envelope Transfer to keep everything green!)
I hope this helped, but please keep asking if you have more questions!
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