Managing savings: Multiple separate bills bank accounts
Learn how to track your savings in PocketSmith with multiple savings accounts.
This guide covers how to manage savings for large annual or periodic expenses using multiple separate bills savings accounts from your main account.
If you would prefer to just use one 'Bills' savings account, please see: Managing savings: A single separate bills bank account.
If you would prefer or need to manage all your income and savings within one account (e.g. an offset account), please see: Managing savings within only one account.
In this user guide
Overview
If you would prefer to open multiple bank accounts to separate and track your savings for specific bills, then read along for the tips.
There are three main stages that this guide will follow:
- Adding your new bills savings accounts to PocketSmith
- Adding expense budgets for each of your bills, reflecting the amount and date the payment will be made
- Calculating the amount you'll need to set aside to cover your larger annual or periodic expenses and create transfer budgets reflecting the amount and frequency of your contributions to each of your savings accounts
Once your categories and budgets are set up, you can use the Calendar page or the Dashboard to see if you're on track to cover your larger periodic bills.
Read on for the steps!
1. Open multiple bank accounts
Create separate bank accounts for your different bills with your bank, and add these to PocketSmith. For example, a Car bills savings account, a House bills savings account, a Health savings account, etc.
For details on creating a new account, see: Adding a new account on the Account Summary page.
2. Adding the expenses to PocketSmith
Create categories for each of your bills
Next, create a specific bill category for each of your bills. To learn more about creating categories, please see Adding new categories.
These will need to be bill categories in particular, please see: Bill and scheduled income categories for more details.
We recommend creating a parent category, e.g. “Bills”, to nest your individual expense categories underneath as sub-categories.
For more details on nesting categories, please see: Sub-categories and nesting.
Create bill expense budgets
You will then need to set up your bill / regular expense budgets to reflect the bill due date or regular expense dates for your respective savings accounts.
These budget events will allow you to see when money is due to come out of your accounts and should be as close to the actual expense dates as possible for the most accurate forecasting.
Under 'Which account's this budget for', select the relevant account. For more details on creating budgets, see Creating a new budget.
House bills savings account, expense bill budgets:
💡 Tip
Where possible, switching your bills to the annual payment frequency can sometimes lead to increased savings. E.g. paying for your car insurance annually as opposed to monthly.
Bonus tip: Staggering these annual bills so they don’t all hit at once can help make things more manageable. E.g. having your car insurance due in March, and your car registration due in November.
3. Calculating and transferring your savings amount
With this approach, there will be smaller transfers from your main account into your individual savings bank accounts for your various bills.
Calculating the amount to save
You will need to create transfer categories and transfer budgets for each of your individual bills.
To calculate the amount to save for each transfer category:
- Head to the Budget page
- Change the Total budget summary date range to This year and select Use Total budget summary date range for budget amount analysis. This will show you the annual budget amounts for your sub-category budgets (even if they occur at different intervals).
- Divide each of these total amounts by your income frequency (e.g. if paid weekly by 52, paid fortnightly by 26), and this is the amount to transfer from your main account into your bills savings accounts each pay for each specific bill.
💡Tip
Where possible, bumping up this transfer amount can help provide a buffer to cover unexpected costs or fluctuations.
Bonus tip: Use automatic transfers for this if your bank offers them. Set the transaction references to relate to the savings goal each transfer is for, to allow for easy categorisation with category rules.
Transfer categories
Set up separate transfer categories to assign your contributions to your savings accounts.
To learn how to create transfer categories, please see: Steps to create a transfer category.
Transfer budgets
Next, you'll need to create a transfer budget for each transfer, reflecting the amount and frequency of your regular contributions. These budgets will allow you to forecast the amount of money coming into each account. For details on creating a budget like this, see "Creating a transfer budget."
For example, if I wanted to transfer $30 for my house insurance and $50 for my house rates each week into the House bills account, this could look like:
Handling internal transfers for making the expense payment
Once your bill is due, you may run into the common scenario where you make the actual expense payment itself from your main everyday account, as this is the account associated with your bank card (so not your savings account).
To make this payment, you will need to transfer the bill amount from your savings account to your main account. For these transfers, we generally recommend assigning them to an “Internal transfers” transfer category.
You can then assign your bill expense transaction to the bill expense category and budget you created in Step 2 of this guide. Any transaction assigned to a category will contribute to the budget, so it is no problem that the expense transaction was not from your savings account.
For more information on creating a transfers category for any internal transfers between accounts, please see: Steps to create a transfer category.
Looking ahead: Forecasting your savings build-up
Once you're all set up, head over to the forecast graph on the Calendar page to see your projected balances based on your budgeted events in each of your savings bills accounts.
- Head to the Calendar page
- Isolate each bills savings account one at a time
You'll be able to see when each of your bills are due, and whether you'll have enough money to cover the expense on the due date.
Below is the house bills account forecast based on the above budgets. You’ll see the income side of the transfer budgets increasing the forecast balance, and then dipping with the expense budgets:
For details on using the Calendar and Forecast graph to see your projected balances, check out Using the Calendar.
Keeping an eye on your account balances
Keep an eye on your account balances and be alerted when any reach or exceed a chosen balance amount with the Dashboard balance alert widget.
Tip: Using labels to view total sums across categories
If you have large annual bill transactions within your PocketSmith across multiple categories, you can use our Labels feature to easily search for and display these results.
For more information on using Labels, please see: Everything you need to know about using labels.
You can create a Saved Search based on this Annual Bills label to view the search results on the Transactions page, or the Dashboard using the Earning and Spending widget, Transactions Column widget or Saved Search widget: