Through a combination of busy-ness en procrastination I didn’t fill my envelopes last month. I now have two salaries and a bunch of transactions to enter in order to get everything back up to date.
What’s the best way to do this? I usually fill my envelopes from New Income (so I don’t inadvertently eat into my buffer/available) but there are two of those now. Also some deductions occur annoyingly on or around the same date as my Fill date so I could end up underfilling them.
Does your bank offer the option to download your transactions in a .csv or .qfx file? If so, I would just import the list(s) to your accounts to catch up on outgo, but ignore the income (for now). Then you can do two “fill from new” transactions to get the envelope balances caught up. Unfortunately you’ll probably have to look at your Scheduled transactions to see what’s coming up near the fill; I don’t know a way to do so automatically (unless you have due dates set up).
If you can’t import them all, you might just Edit the account balances to today’s balance, which will add a line item that essentially combines all your transactions into one line item. Be sure to account for any pending transactions too! It won’t help your envelopes but it will realign the number in Available to match your true buffer, then you can do the fills you need.
I might also suggest that if you don’t want to use your “buffer” money, put it in envelope instead of “Available”. You can always move it around when you need it, but that way your available balance really does reflect what you’re willing to spend.
Does that help?
Yes, I always use a .csv import and have gotten pretty slick at it. So at least I don’t have to do all the grunt work.
It was more a question of whether I need to import and fill two separate months, or whether I could do it all in one go - but I couldn’t see how the latter might work with two fills being needed.
You should be able to do it all at once; it doesn’t recalculate based on earlier entries so everything you put in, both income and transactions, will just populate the ledger up to today. When you enter the income the envelope balances won’t really matter because you’ll be updating them with the current info anyway. Your reports will be based on budgeted amounts, not envelope totals, so they should be ok too.