When I open a pending envelope fill on the web to the right is the Income Amount and the Amount Filled values, but they are just dashes. What do I need to do to have those fields show actual values?
The income amount is not that big of a deal because I can see that from the deposit amount, but the amount filled is important because right now I have to individually add up all my fill amounts which is a major pain since I have many envelopes being filled.
Unless I’m mistaken, the fills are dashes because the system won’t know exactly how much to add until the fill happens and that’s why the amount says “Varies”. I suppose if all your envelopes were assigned “Add” instead of “Set”, which would mean the fill never varied, they might not show dashes but as long as some envelopes (even those that aren’t being filled) are “Set”, it won’t calculate in advance.
I’m sure Alex or Karisa can confirm but I think this is the programming logic.
Thank you Tiffany for your reply. I agree that if an envelope had a “Set” amount then your reasoning is correct. However all 63 envelopes in my fill have the “Add” option. I would think it’s pretty simple programming to see all envelopes have the “Add” option, then to add up all the values each envelope fill to display in the Amount Filled.
Looking forward to what the developers have to say.
Hi Wayne,
The reason for the Varies is less that the program doesn’t check between Add and Set, and more that even the “Add” Fill option can vary. To explain what I mean, if you choose the “Add to budgeted amount” for a certain Envelope, while the screen will show a Fill amount of whatever your Envelope’s budgeted amount is at the time of creating / editing the Fill, when the Fill actually posts, it will calculate your budgeted amount at the time of the Fill, which can be different than when the Fill is created or edited. The Fill doesn’t attempt to divine the future, so it just says that the Fill amount may vary.
It is true there are certain cases that would indeed always have an explicitly fixed Fill amount, like if your Fill Adds a specific amount, rather than using a budgeted amount, but rather than run through a checklist to determine what case a Fill is, a scheduled Envelope Fill will simply report that its Fill amount “Varies”.
I hope that makes sense!
Thank you Alex, that makes sense. Maybe I just learned something new about GB then. Please let me know if I’m understanding you correctly. Let’s say I enter my next 4 weeks income using 4 envelope fills. I have to do separate fills and not recurring because I need to see my projected cash flow for the upcoming month. I fill my envelopes with the budgeted amount. Then half way through the month I change my budget for a particular envelope. The future fills will automatically change based on the new budget amount. Is that correct?
Currently, I’ve been going back and manually editing the future fills based on the budget changes I’ve made. Now it sounds like I didn’t need to. Looking forward to your response.
Hey Alex, still waiting for your response to my question above. I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly.
Hi Wayne,
Sorry for the late reply. For some reason it didn’t show me that the topic had been updated…still kinks to work out in the new forums I suppose! If ever you need to really shout at us, please feel free to use the @ – @alex for instance, will force me a notification.
As for the question at hand, I did some testing, and it seems your earlier instinct was correct, so I apologise for misinforming. In other words, even if you choose the Add or Set “to budgeted amount” option, it will not smartly update to your new budgeted amounts, so you’ll have to do that manually if you make budgeted amount changes. I think at some point this was the intent, hence the behaviour of the scheduled Fill transactions, but it is not currently the case, so I’ve made note of your feedback and what you were looking for! Thanks for raising this and sharing this conversation.
Thanks Alex for letting me know.
I noticed that in pending transactions that my monthly envelope fill shows “varies” instead of the amount. Why is this? This makes it difficult for me to make sure that the amount is correct.
Hi Dcntruman, I’ve merged your question into this post to refer you to this answer I wrote previously with regards to your question: