I scheduled an envelope transfer for the 11th of November and it seems to have posted today, on the 10th. Anyone know why this might have happened? Do the scheduled envelope transfers not work the way I’m expecting?
Are you positive you checked the “Schedule this” box when you created the transaction? I can’t believe how many times I forget to check that box and it shows up below the pending transaction list.
@Dexter it looks like you may have accidentally responded to the digest email, which doesn’t post a reply to this thread, so I’m reproducing your response here for conversation’s sake:
Yeah I probably didn’t tick the box. I thought I had edited an existing recurring transaction, which was a bank transfer, to an envelope transfer. In the process of doing that I guess I didn’t check the schedule was still set. I’ve since deleted it and created a new one and that is working properly.
That still leaves the question of why a future dated envelope transfer seems to post immediately. I would think it would still show as pending. So for a one-off future transaction do I need to schedule it and choose “once”?
As for a response, I’m not quite sure what you mean when you’re saying you “edited a bank transfer to an envelope transfer”. It sounds like you’re saying that you swapped an Account Transfer into an Envelope Transfer, but it’s not possible to edit a recurring Account Transfer into an Envelope Transfer, as they’re different types of transactions. The only time you can swap between the two types of Transfer is when you’re creating an entirely new transaction, but in that case the Scheduled box should stay checked even if you toggle between the options.
But in general, yes. If you want a transaction to be scheduled for the future and not post immediately, you’ll have to use the “Schedule this…” box. Simply setting the transaction date to a future date will not cause the transaction to be scheduled, it’ll just post immediately for that future date.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll try and reproduce what I did. It may be that it was a new transaction because I couldn’t change it from the original.
What’s the purpose of future transactions without the schedule selection posting immediately? (Not a complaint, I’m just curious about the use case.)
I can’t speak to every possible use case (because there are always people doing things I / we haven’t thought of!) but the most common case is something like: “I know I haven’t actually made this payment yet, but I want my Envelope balance to show the depletion now so that I don’t overspend on accident.”
Scheduled transactions do give you the theoretical future running balance in the ledger, but you can’t see their future effects just by quickly glancing at the Envelope balance bars, so some people prefer to set known transactions in stone so that they have a clearer idea of what money they’re actually working with.
That makes sense. Thanks.