Tracking per-account envelope balances

Questions
1

Maybe this is too specific but is there a way to see or track which account(s) the money in a given envelope is tied to? Example:

  • “Dining Out” envelope has $100 dollars in it, all of which is in my checking account
  • I pay for dinner with friends and record the transaction (say -$80) to my checking account and my Dining Out envelope
  • My friends Venmo me for their parts of the bill and I record that as income (say $60) to my Venmo account and my Dining Out envelope
  • So now my status is:
    • Dining Out envelope = $80, of which $60 is in Venmo and $20 is in Checking

Is there any way to visualize this in the app? Or the inverse, see which envelopes the balance of each account is allocated for?

The reason I’m asking is that I’ve structured my budget to basically have a set of specific envelopes that make up the balance of each account but sometimes I end up with an account having money in it that is allocated to an envelope that otherwise doesn’t “belong” to that account. This isn’t inherently a problem (i.e. I don’t necessarily need or want to make an account transfer to reconcile it) but it would be cool if there was a way to track it so I could recognize and make corrections if things get really out of whack.

2

There’s no option for that right now, because the way Goodbudget works is to aggregate all your money before allocating it to envelopes. That is similar to a feature that other people have requested for savings, where the money and one account is tied to a specific envelope. The way I’ve gotten around it for the savings account is to create a separate envelope that I mirror to my savings by hand. That works OK in that instance, but wouldn’t be great for what you’re describing.

Bottom line, right now Goodbudget allocates your aggregate money into your envelopes, but doesn’t give you the option to match an envelope with an account (except for debt). You might send this to the admins through the “suggest a feature“ pathway, but I don’t think it’s anywhere on the road map for now.