Budgeting

BranchBooks budgets with envelopes. Every expense category is an envelope, and you give each one money from what you have.

The numbers on the Budget page

• Available is what an envelope holds: last month’s Available, plus what you assigned and moved in this month, plus this month’s activity (spending is negative, refunds are positive).
• Unassigned is money not yet given a job: what’s in your on-budget cash accounts, minus what every envelope holds, minus what you’ve assigned to future months. It is one figure for today’s month and is the same whichever month you look at.

Which accounts count

Accounts are on or off budget, set by the kind you choose when you add one and changed with Edit. Checking, savings you spend from, and credit cards are usually on budget. Brokerage and retirement accounts are usually off budget. Money moving from an off-budget account into an on-budget one counts as income.

An account can also be a placeholder, which only groups its sub-accounts and holds no money itself.

Assigning and moving money

Assign gives money from Unassigned to an envelope. Move shifts money from one envelope to another and never changes Unassigned. A move can’t take an envelope below zero.

Overspending

When you spend more than an envelope holds, BranchBooks splits the overspend:

• Cash overspending, paid from checking, carries into next month as a negative Available until you cover it.
• Credit overspending, charged to a card, never reaches the card’s payment envelope, so the card is marked underfunded.

Assigning or moving money into an overspent envelope covers the cash part first, then the credit part.

Credit cards

Each card has a payment envelope. When you buy something on a card from a funded envelope, that money moves into the card’s payment envelope, ready to pay the bill. Paying the card spends from its payment envelope. Refunds work in reverse.

You can also assign money straight to a card’s payment envelope, to pay down debt from before you started budgeting.

Closing a month

Closing a month marks it as reviewed. Reopening it keeps a record of the earlier close.