Budgets
How a budget is compared against what you actually spent, what carrying over does, and why deleting a budget changes nothing in the ledger.
A budget is a plan for a category or a group of categories, compared against what the ledger says actually happened.
Budgets sit over the ledger, never inside it
Nothing in a budget writes a transaction. An assignment isn’t a posting. Every budget figure is computed from your plans and the entries you already have, which has one consequence worth knowing:
Deleting a budget leaves your books exactly as they were.
What you can budget
- A category, like “groceries, $400 a month”.
- A group of categories, like “everything under Home, $1,200 a month”.
A budget is about one or the other, never both, and a group budgeted as the sum of its categories can’t also hold a budget of its own. The two would disagree and there’d be no way to say which was right.
Periods and carrying over
A budget covers a period, usually a month. What a period didn’t spend can carry into the next one if you want it to.
The carry is folded at read time and never stored. That’s what lets a back-dated correction change every period after it: enter a receipt you forgot from March, and April onward re-fold to match.
Refunds count
A refund into a budgeted category gives the budget back. That follows from refunds lowering spending rather than raising income. The budget compares against spending, and the spending went down.
What “left to assign” means
Money in accounts the budget is about, minus what’s already assigned. Credit cards are included by default, because spending on a card empties an envelope; leaving them out would say there’s more to assign than there is.
An account the budget shouldn’t see, such as a mortgage or a retirement account, can be left out: turn off The budget is about the money in this account on that account. It changes no balance and no report, only that one figure.