Distributing rollover surpluses
Beta feature
Rollover budgeting is only currently available to those that have opted-in to the beta program. If you aren't currently in the beta program, this guide shows how you can join: Becoming a beta tester in PocketSmith
As rollover budgeting is a beta feature, we need your help to get it to a full release for all users. We will be sharing updates during the beta over in our rollover budgeting subreddit. Please let us know in this subreddit if you have any issues or feedback about rollover budgeting or alternatively just send us a message.
In order to possibly have rollover surpluses to distribute to other categories, you need to have enabled rollover budgeting on some categories. You can find out more about rollover budgets in the following guide: Rollover budgeting.
Multi-currency not supported
Multi-currency is not currently supported within rollover budget redistribution. This will be added during the beta period.
If you redistribute a surplus between budgets with different currencies, no conversion will take place and it will just be the raw amount.
In this user guide
What are rollover surpluses?
When you have a rollover expense category, the underspent amounts for a budget period are rolled over to the next budget period, if you are rolling over both the over and underspent amounts or just the underspent amounts. This underspent amount is the rollover surplus.
For example, if you have a $50 weekly Entertainment budget. Last week you only spent $30 on Entertainment, so $20 is rollover over to this week's budget as the rollover surplus. You now have a $70 Entertainment budget for this week which includes this $20 rollover surplus.
Why distribute rollover surpluses?
You might want to distribute rollover surpluses because:
- You have rollover deficits in some categories and want to get them out of deficit using surpluses in other categories
- You have accrued some large surpluses for some categories and want to use this surplus to give you more leeway in other budget categories
- You want to "lock-in" the surplus to the category that has gained the surplus
Note
At the moment this feature is designed to only distribute rollover surpluses. It can't be used to move money from budgets that don't have a rollover surplus, nor balance expense budgets to an income amount. However, we will be building a similar interface in the future to enable these distribution types.
What happens when you distribute surpluses
When you distribute surpluses from one category to another one, PocketSmith will edit the current budget amount for the category that is getting the surplus. So the new budget amount for the category will be the original budget amount plus the surplus amount distributed to the category.
This means that if you have a repeating budget amount for a category, this will add an exception to the current budget period with a different amount to the other budget periods for this category.
How to distribute rollover surpluses
- 1
- Head to the Budget page
- 2
-
Click
Distribute rollover surplus in the toolbar
- 3
-
Select the category with a surplus that you want to distribute
- 4
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To add a surplus to a category, you can:
- Drag and drop the surplus bar to the receiving category to add the full amount from the remaining surplus pool, or
- Adjust the slider on the receiving category, or
- Enter the amount manually in the receiving category
- 5
- Click CONFIRM ALL
- 6
- Check the distribution amounts you have made and click SUBMIT
Note
- Only the categories with a surplus will be able to be distributed to other categories
- It is only possible to distribute the rollover surplus amount, not the original budget amount for a category
- The additional surplus that has been distributed will be applied to the current budget period
Surplus distribution on the Calendar
After you have distributed rollover surpluses, a new Surplus distribution event will be shown on the calendar on the date it occurred.
Hovering on the Surplus distribution event will show a breakdown of how the surpluses were distributed to categories.
