Budget forms for creating or editing budgets

When first setting up a new budget or editing an existing budget, there are two budget forms available.

You can choose from either the SIMPLE BUDGET FORM or the ADVANCED OPTIONS Budget Form. Read on for more on the differences between these two forms below!

The Simple Budget Form

The Simple Budget Form is great for making quick changes to details.

• What is this budget for?

  This will already display the category you chose to create a budget for, or you can change the category here.

• Does this budget repeat?

  Are you budgeting for a repeating expense or income? Select Yes if so, and choose a repeating period. Learn more here: Repeating budgets and how to make changes to them.

• How much?

  Here you can add an amount for your budget and select whether this is an  expense or an income budget. We recommend setting round numbers for budgets that vary (e.g. Groceries) and exact amounts for ones that don't (e.g. Insurance or Salary).

• Which account's forecast is this budget for?

  Select which account you would like this budget to forecast against. This means that on the calendar, you can select this account and see how the budget affects this particular account's balance. 

For more in-depth details, you can select Advanced Options:

The Advanced Options Budget form

From the Advanced Options Budget form, you can make further adjustments to your budget.

• Budget start date - Budget end date

  By default, when starting a new budget from the Budget page, the start date will be the first day of the budget period determined by PocketSmith based on the frequency and nature of transactions assigned to that category. You can change the start date here, and choose whether you'd like to apply an end date for this budget.

• This is a transfer 

  If the transactions in this budget category are moving between your accounts or to an asset or debt, tick the checkbox and from the dropdown menu select the account where the transfer will go to (if you chose an Expense budget) or come from (if you chose an Income budget). Learn more here: Creating a transfer budget

• This is a bill / This is scheduled income

  If this budget is for a bill category or scheduled income category, choose this option so that PocketSmith analyses the budgets correctly.

  If you've already set this category up as a bill category or scheduled income, this option will automatically be selected for you in the budget form. You can learn more here: The difference between bill /scheduled income budgets and non-bill/non-scheduled income repeating budgets

• Budget notes

  Type in any extra details you want to add to this budget.

• Color 

  By default, a new budget will be assigned the same color as its category, if the category has a color applied. However, you can choose to use a different color for your budget here. This will be reflected on the Calendar.

  
  

  To learn how to add a color to the category, or to force the budgets to have the same color as the category, see: Steps to edit category details

  
  
  

You can always jump back to the Simple Budget Form as desired:

Assigning a budget to an account

When asked: "Which account's forecast is this budget for?", this is asking you to assign the budget to the account that it's most likely to be spent from. However, any transaction assigned to a category counts towards the budget for that category regardless of the account it came from 🙌

The account assigned to each budget is purely for forecasting purposes. This option allows PocketSmith to link budgets to a specific account (scenario) so that we can forecast the future balances for that account. On the Calendar page, you can select this bank account and see how the budget affects the account's forecasted future balance. You can learn more about this here: How budgets create your forecast.