Managing savings within only one account

There are many different approaches to managing savings; some prefer or need to keep all savings within just one account, e.g., an offset account, instead of our recommended option of creating specific accounts for different savings goals, as shown in this guide: Managing budgets for large periodic bills or savings goals.

In order to track savings within a single account, we recommend checking out two of our Beta features - Rollover and Safe Balance.

Using Rollover to 'allocate' funds

Rollover allows under-spent / under-earned or over-spent / over-earned amounts to be carried over from one budget period to the next. This would allow you to use repeating budgets to 'allocate' funds to a set goal.

For example, if you'd like to allocate $50 per month to Clothes & Shoes, you would set up a monthly repeating $50 expense budget with rollover turned on. If you didn't spend anything on Clothes & Shoes for three months, the budget would accumulate to $150 - three lots of that $50 budget.

You can find more details on how to use Rollover here: Rollover budgeting.

You could then also use Safe Balance to see how much is left in your bank account after these budgets are taken into account.

Using Safe Balance to view what is safe-to-spend

Safe Balance takes your current balance for an account and applies any unspent and unearned budget portions from current budgets to it, giving you a current balance that is safe-to-spend once all outstanding spending and earning is taken into account.

Following the above example, if your current account balance was $2000, but you hadn't spent anything on Clothes & Shoes for that three-month period, then the Safe Balance would show that you have $1850 available to spend (2000 - 150).

You can read about safe balances in greater depth: Overview of Safe balance.

Adapting for general savings and an example

You can also adapt this for general Savings. 

In the below example, we have created a $75 per week repeating budget which started 1st January and has rollover on.

The Safe Balance breakdown chart (as displayed in the above guide), shows that this has accrued to $1,350. As such, the Safe Balance (that which hasn't been allocated to a budget) is showing as $148,400.