Using budgets instead of future-dated transactions

Transactions in PocketSmith are meant for income and expenses that have already happened (actuals), while budgets are used for planning your future income and expenses (forecast). We do not recommend adding future-dated transactions.

You can learn how to create budgets with this guide: Creating a new budget.

Budgets in PocketSmith are for upcoming income and expenses and are used to forecast the balances of your accounts.

So, if you want to add a future-dated transaction to see what your account balance will be on that date, then you can do this with a budget and the forecast.

If you would like to learn more about how to see your forecasted account balance with budgets, follow this guide: Using the Calendar and Forecast graph.

Adding future-dated transactions can result in incorrect balances.

The reports and dashboard widgets in PocketSmith are designed for transactions that have already occurred, so transactions have today's date or have a date in the past.

If you enter a transaction with a date in the future, the reports may not show accurately or be useful.

If you have created future-dated transactions in an account with feed support, this can lead to possible duplicate transactions if the feed imports the actual transaction.

PocketSmith is intentionally highly customisable and we understand that our users have their own way of using PocketSmith that best suits them.