I came to GoodBudget from Mvelopes, which I had used for many, many years. I’ve been using GoodBudget for about a year now and, for the most part, it works well. I do miss the automatic transaction downloading from my accounts, but after a year of downloading them manually every time I sit down to reconcile my finances, I’ve gotten used to it.
However, one Mvelopes function that I REALLY miss is “Sweep”. The ability to budget an amount for overages into an envelope and then use that envelope to reclaim money from some envelopes and fix overages in others in one step and with just a few clicks was a killer feature.
I haven’t found anything close to that in GoodBudget and accomplishing it manually (using individual envelope transfers), is incredibly tedious and time consuming.
Am I missing something? Is there some feature in GoodBudget that I’m not aware of that could make this kind of “sweep” activity easier?
Isn’t this kind of the “Unallocated” envelope? A new Fill says “sweep remainder into Unallocated” (or wherever). When you “set” a budget to a new amount, it pulls or pushes in and out of Unallocated if you’re not filling from new income. Is this different from what you’re used to?
Hmm. I haven’t used the “set” feature. I didn’t really understand how it worked. It sounds like it might come somewhere close. One major difference I can see is that the Mvelopes “sweep” function allowed me to choose the envelope to pull and push from.
I’ll do some experimentation and perhaps re-think how I do things to fit how GoodBudget works.
“Set” will make the envelope hold exactly that much; if you’ve over- or underspent it will correct it to the amount you designate. An overage will go into Unallocated and a refill will come from it.
In contrast, “Add” will fill with exactly that amount and disregard the envelope level at the time.
At the end of the month I do a “Fill from Unallocated” as a single sweep across all my monthly envelopes. Just go down the list and click “Set” to make them all zero to start fresh for the next month. Money left in envelopes gets swept into envelopes that were overdrawn, all in a single transaction.
Thanks for your post! You can ‘Sweep’ when you Fill your Envelopes from Income. If you’re on the web, you’ll click the Fill Envelopes button, and then fill out the ‘New Income’ section. On the right side of the screen, you’ll see a ‘Sweep’ option appear that will allow you to sweep any leftovers from your paycheck into an Envelope, or pull any extra that you need from an Envelope.