Budgets

Budgets help you plan your future income and expenses stay on track with your earning and spending.

Creating budgets for your categories lets you quickly see how much money you have left in a particular period, detect overspending, and track incoming funds. You can create daily, weekly, monthly budgets and more on both the Budget page and within the calendar on the Calendar page. PocketSmith will evenly distribute your budget amounts across the budget period you choose for your regular (non-bill) categories. For your bill or scheduled income categories, PocketSmith will treat the budget as a whole amount that occurs on the day the budget starts (or repeats).

If you use sub-categories, you can roll up sub-category budgets to see the overall budget on the parent category. Check out the Trends page to drill down into your budgeted categories and analyze your trends over time. Plus, don't forget to download our mobile app 📱 so you can see how you're tracking against your budgets while on the run!

Quick Answers

Can I edit my budgets?

Yes you can! Check out options for editing a budget here: Editing, moving or deleting a budget

How do my budgets affect my forecast?

Every budget you create will be applied to your forecast balance (check out your forecast graph at the top of the Calendar page). The more budgets you add based on your planned actual earning and spending, the more accurate your forecasted balances will be!

I'm trying to edit or delete my budget, why is the three-dot menu not appearing?

PocketSmith offers the ability for regular users to edit their own budgets and categories, but if you’re using PocketSmith through enableMe, then all budgets are linked to NestEgg (enableMe software) and you cannot edit your categories and budgets. You’ll need to contact your coach if you want to change a budget or category.

How do I change the date on my budget?

You can either do this directly on the Calendar page by moving a budget with a simple drag and drop. Or you can change the start date of a budget by editing the budget on the Budget page.

I have a repeating budget and I just want to change one event - but not all future events - can I do this?

Because a repeating budget has multiple budget events attached to it (based on the frequency you've chosen for your budget to repeat), you can apply actions to just one budget event! Learn more about this here: Options for applying changes to a repeating budget

How are the figures at the top of the Budget page calculated?

There are two bars in the budget summary. Income: this is calculated based on the total of your income budgets compared to your actual categorized income transactions; Expense: this is calculated based on the total of your expense budgets compared to your actual categorized expense transactions.

Please note, transfer transactions and transfer budgets are excluded from these calculations.

When I create my budget, I need to assign it to an account. But if I use a different account to make a purchase will it still be counted against my budget?

Any transaction assigned to a category counts towards the budget for that category regardless of the account it came from!

PocketSmith links budgets to a specific account (scenario) so that we can forecast the future balances for that account. You can see which budget events affect specific account forecasts on the Calendar page by toggling your accounts on/off to show the budgets. Learn about creating a budget here: Creating a new budget

How do I create a budget for payments that occur on the 1st and 15th of the month?

Although you can't technically create two occurrences within one budget event, you can work around this by creating two (or more) budgets of the same name which repeat on the days you want. For example, one series for the 1st, and another for the 15th. PocketSmith will then combine these for you on the Budget page.