Debit & Credit - Budgets

Debit & Credit User Guide

Budgets

The Best Way to Control Your Spending

We all like to spend money. Sometimes, though, we spend on things that we could have lived without. It is reasonable to try limiting that kind of spending and that's where budgeting becomes really helpful.

Creating a budget in Debit & Credit allows you to see how much you spend on a particular set of expense categories within a preset limit.

Please note that budgets were designed to manage variable expenses that can be easily controlled, e.g. entertainment expenses, restaurants, games, etc. If you want to budget every single category of expense, consider using financial plans instead.

Budget Attributes

Every budget in Debit & Credit has the following set of attributes:

Name - description for your own reference.
Limit - how much you are willing to spend on the categories included in a budget.
Categories - expense categories that should be included in a budget.
Start date - when do you want to start budgeting.
Repeating period - when do you want your budget to reset. Examples: every two weeks, every month, etc.
Carry over - whether you want to transfer unused funds remaining at the end of a budget period to the next budget period. Negative amounts are not transferred by default.
Carry over negative amounts - this option is displayed only if carry over is enabled. It allows you to carry over negative amounts as well.
Include pending transactions - this option is displayed only if you use pending transactions. You can include pending transactions into a budget.
Previous limits - displayed only if you have changed the budget limit in the past. It allows you to view and edit previous budget limits. Very useful in case if you use carry over for your budgets.
Tags - this option is displayed only if have enabled tags in the app settings. You can filter by or exclude particular tags from a budget.

Examples

John likes going out with his friends every weekend. However, he wants to limit this kind of spending to $500 per month. He creates a budget with a limit of $500 that starts today and includes the following categories into his budget: night clubs, cafes, restaurants.

Mary loves fancy dresses. She wants to limit her spending on dresses to $200 per month, however, she wants to be able to save money for a more expensive dress once in a while. She creates a monthly $200 budget for dresses with the carry over option enabled. This way she can spend less for a few months to save some money and spend it later on an expensive dress.