Improved budgets
October 30th, 2008 by ShashankWe have revamped the budgeting system, to let you create budgets in accordance with your income. You can distribute your income across different tags, and set spending limits for the upcoming week/month. The budgets page displays the remaining balance available for spending for each tag.
This is based on the envelope system of budgeting. If you were using the older style of budgeting, you will have an option to move over to the new system, or continue using the old one.
Let us know if you like (or don’t like) it!
October 30th, 2008 at 1:52 am
I would love to see that if you have left over from a budget in a previous time period - that you could spend it in the next period (say i had a quiet month I could party twice as hard in the next month).
October 30th, 2008 at 7:45 am
I second Craig. That’s right, for once, the Craigs and the Gregs of the world stand united.
Definitely need to be able to carry over. Would be nice if this were a option to check per category.
For everything else, ignore all Craigs, always.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I think this is similar to what I’d like to see, which is a way to bust up your savings into categories…
October 30th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I third Craig, but since I’m a William my voice will no doubt be silenced by the Craig/Greg Axis ;-). I like the envelope budget idea, but without the ability to move leftover money it’s kinda… not so different.
Anyhow, I would really like:
1. Time spans: some of my budget categories are monthly, some are quarterly, some are yearly, and one is a 5-year-plan (that one takes care of large capital expenditures like furniture and cars). I can’t tell what the time span IS for the envelope budgets — I guess monthly, but I can’t tell, and one actually looks yearly. How am I supposed to tell?
2. Budget statistics: averages, success/failure counts, etc. Ideally, fancy statistics, such as how I’m doing currently on a budget (compared to the historical burn rate for that budget). I’d recommend “earned value” metrics for this., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_value_management), since you probably have some managers at your workplace who understand it; otherwise, there are some more robust statistical methods that can be used, let me know if there’s any interest.
3. Argh — my old budgets disappeared. I had NO idea that was going to happen. I spent a ton of effort on those numbers. I don’t need them back, but you might want to at least put a warning in there.
4. I’m seeing some odd behavior; when I click on a budget’s name the graph shows all bars being tiny and red, almost as if they were -1. This is the case for all the budgets. This makes it impossible to tell if a budget is realistic.
5. When I click “Edit” for a budget, it puts the only thing I can edit under the “Spent” heading, when it’s actually the “Limit”. (Hey, this one’s easy to fix!) :-)
October 30th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
1: The idea of envelope budgeting is to create a set of budgets, all for the same time period, depicting how you want to distribute your income across different spending categories. So if you choose to use the new budgeting system, you can only select one period for all budgets. The period is shown on the top right of the budget page, and is the same as you select for your reports.
3: To go back to your previous budgets, click on ‘Back to old version’ on the Budgets page.
5: Fixed :)
2, 4: Looking into it …
October 30th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Also, carrying over the left over amount to the next period is causing some technical issues. Hopefully we will get them resolved soon ..
October 30th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
@Wm,
When you move over to the new budgets, the prompt does say “Your current budgets will NOT be carried over to the new system. Instead, you will see a few default budgets automatically created based on your past spending.”
October 30th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hmmm… There seems to be a problem with accessing my old budgets now. In the blue bar above the list of created budgets, it says “1 - 10 of 25″ with a little arrow pointing to the right. However clicking it doesn’t take me to budgets 11-20. A shame, because my “supermarket” budget is the one I follow most closely.
Also: please let me carry over left-over money from previous months into the next. I’ve been dying for that featur!
I’m glad the budgets are now sorted alphabetically though. Or the first 10, at least. :-)
October 30th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
@Wm (again!),
The new budgets have a marker which shows your current state wrt the budget, i.e. even if you have a monthly budget, you can use it as a weekly budget by looking at this marker. Does that make sense?
October 30th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
@GB,
That should be fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out! :)
October 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Agreed on rollovers for an envelope system.
I have some strangeness under “All tags” and “Other tags.” These don’t seem to come from anywhere in the sense that their “Limits” seem arbitrary. I can fudge the numbers around in such a way to make them work, but they don’t make intuitive sense. I have a huge number in my limit for “Other tags” and a very small limit for “All tags.” This seems strange to me.
Dates that a cycle begins and ends on should also be included here.
This has huge potential, and you guys have some great features. The today line is particularly interesting, and the interface (minus the edit/spent quirk is quick and sharp.
I think this will be a feature that puts you on top of the other online budgeting solutions. Congratulations on some great work; keep it improving!
October 30th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Josh,
The limit is exactly equal to your income for that period. I see your point that the limit should at least be equal to the sum of limits of individual budgets .. I will make that change soon.
Dates that a cycle begin are displayed on the top-right of the page, is that too much in the corner?
And the edit/spent quirk has been resolved :)
October 30th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Shashank, thanks for the quick response.
Things are working now. I don’t know if you tweaked or I tweaked, but things are making sense.
Thanks!
October 30th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Ah, that makes sense.
Okay… That’s cool, but there’s a few serious problems.
1. It’s way too hard and non-obvious how to set the budgeting period. That really needs to be made part of the budgeting screen.
2. It’s way too easy to accidentally change the budgeting period — I use the reports a LOT. Changing the report period shouldn’t affect the budgets.
3. Changing the budgeting period doesn’t change the amounts allocated per period, so if you were originally 3 months but you switch to 1 month, every budget will be WAY overfunded and permanently green; totally useless.
Problems #1 and 2 are obvious. I can think of a few solutions for problem #3.
A. Freeze the budget periods; don’t let the user set them, or allow them to set them only once (at the same time they set the Limits).
B. Make the “limit” be a percentage of total income (so the user is allowed to type in an integer from 0-100), and require the percentages to total to 100% (and subcategories would interact with their supercategories, don’t ask me how)
C. Allow the user to type in a Limit dollar amount, and scale it up or down with the newly selected period. Either scale linearly, or proportionally to that period’s income contribution.
I don’t see a clear “win” among all of these. I’d lean toward “A”, given what we’ve discussed, but I like the others for their flexibility.
-Wm
October 30th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Hmm .. I see your point. The budget period should be de-coupled from the reports period. Let me think a little more on what’s the best way to fix this .. thanks for your inputs! :)
October 31st, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I am loving Buxfer so much and am telling everyone I can about it (seriously - people are tired of hearing me talk about it). The thing that drew me to Buxfer is the budgeting tools, and I’m really excited about this change to use the envelope system, since I had to create a zero-based budget outside of Buxfer and then put that in.
I haven’t had a chance to convert to the new budgeting system yet, but I’ll throw in my vote for the rollover.
One other feature that is keeping me from wholeheartedly giving Buxfer a 10 is to have sub-budgets (like you can have sub-tags). We used that all the time on Quicken, and it’s the only thing we miss.
Thanks for all of your hard work and I’m so grateful for such a wonderful tool, you all have really improved a lot of lives.
October 31st, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Oh, I just realized that the budgets are now based on tags alone, does that mean that sub-tags will add up to their parent tags?
October 31st, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Great with the envelope budgeting! I second, third or whatever the Craig/Greg/William point with carrying budgets over to the next period, but may have a slightly different idea of envelope budgeting.
The best thing with envelope budgeting is that you can save up for a future expense, by filling the envelope with an amount each month, so that the envelope has the necessary amount by the time the expense comes (like a holiday trip).
So I don’t quite understand having to set a set amount for each tag, that is the limit every month. One month I may wish to put $500 into an envelope, the next month I have more other expenses, so I only put $100 in the holiday envelope.
That is, all the money I have available I’d like to have in envelopes. Money that could be used for anything could be in an “Available” envelope, or in this case “Other tags” (which includes items with no tags too?). If I realize that I have a lot in “available” for one month, I may decide to put more in a “savings” or “holiday” envelope that month instead. That means that money is locked and can’t be used for general expenditure, although it’s in the same bank account.
With the current budgeting system I still don’t quite see how much of the money in all my accounts that are actually available for spending, and what’s locked for future expenses.
Also, I get my salary on the 25th each month (or earlier if it’s on a Saturday or Sunday). By the time that date arrives the month is almost over and the budgets for a month will almost always display red. How do I deal with that?
I’d like to have the income distributed to the different envelopes whenever I get my salary and need only one place to see how much money is in each envelope. Looking at budgets by month is to me more like the reports to see how much I spent and earned in previous months. But if using the envelope system for budgets, why split it by month? If I put money in an envelope it’s there until I take it out to pay something, whether it’s a day or a year. If I want to look at my financial history I can go to the reports. :)
Just my 2 cents.
And btw, Buxfer is fantastic and improving day by day!
November 1st, 2008 at 5:53 am
Kristen, that’s right. If you create a budget for a parent-tag, it should add up the expenses for the sub-tags.
November 1st, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Not to pile on too much, but the “carrying over” idea that has already been spoken is really central to the concept of envelope budgeting. I’m glad to hear you’re working it out! I’m not sure I would call anything envelope budgeting if money disappears out of the envelopes over time without having been spent.
November 1st, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Josh,
Money doesn’t disappear, but the envelopes have a life of 1 month (or whatever period you set them to) After that, they are renewed/refunded automatically .. logical because you get paid every month, so you automatically put a fixed part of that into each envelope.
Based on your comments, I understand there are two distinct choices we are talking about here:
1: whether you want to rollover envelopes
2: whether you want to automatically renew envelopes
Craig/Greg/William seem to be suggesting they need only (1), and are okay with automatic renewals.
Josh wants an option to prevent (2) from happening. Is that right?
Also, there is the question of whether people would like to see this happen per budget, or to All budgets. Would you want to carry over only some budgets, not the rest?
All in all, it seems we won’t be able to provide all these options. It will make the interface unnecessarily complex. Right now, this is what I lean towards:
Provide an option in Budgets » Settings, where you could use a checkbox to rollover ALL your budgets. The automatic renewing seems to be the desirable behavior for most people ..
November 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Hope I didn’t confuse you :) If you feel I misunderstood something, please point it out. So I can implement exactly what you guys are looking for!
November 1st, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Shashank, I’m glad you’re discussing this with us; it’s great to have a role in the next big feature.
I think Josh is technically right; what he’s describing is an important part of envelope budgeting. But it’s only a part of the whole picture.
Here’s how I see it. :-)
In envelope budgeting, you don’t set “limit”s; instead, you fund each envelope with a certain amount of money per period of time; you could have an envelope that receives $5 every week, and another one that gets $400 every month. It’s also possible to have an envelope funded at $0; that envelope will only accumulate money when the user puts it there, it’ll never automatically gain money (this is what Josh’s talking about).
Whenever you receive income, it gets put into your “other tags” envelope (which might perhaps be renamed to “general income”). All the money currently in your savings goes there too. The user can transfer money from any envelope to any other envelope.
When you spend money in the envelope’s category, money gets taken from the envelope.
Could you possibly implement that?
And when you’re done, could you have Buxfer pay all my bills, feed my pets, and wash and wax my car? :-)
Thank you! Buxfer is a great program, and as far as I can tell it’s the only online finance program whose programmers pay any attention to the community.
November 1st, 2008 at 11:33 pm
One previous approach to online envelope budgeting is X (I won’t name them). I was subscribed to it for a year or so. It’s very expensive, but it’s also very, very hard to use. My big gripes:
1. It provides NO information on your spending habits, so it’s almost impossible to set a budget if you don’t already KNOW what your spending should be. It can be handy to know the average, minimum, and maximum over all periods, and knowing the 70% confidence interval (one sigma) would be nice too.
2. Setting it up is a pain. You have to set up your envelopes, set up your accounts, move income into envelopes, assign expenses to accounts, … It’s all very slow, and there are almost no summary reports to let you know how your choices affect the big picture — except that each envelope shows the amount of money left in it.
Within a few month, all my envelopes were red. I let them go, and just collected data, hoping to set some kind of budget once I had some data… But the lack of reports made it hard, and catching up when something’s wrong was very, very hard.
I’m sure they’ve gotten better; I don’t downtalk them anywhere else, but I don’t want Buxfer to emulate their failures.
November 1st, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Hmm… It occurs to me that when I create a new Envelope, I often will want to know its past performance: if I’d funded it at my proposed level every period since some start date (and spent at the level that I actually did), how much money would be in the envelope now?
Budgets used to have a start date and a period. I’d like envelopes to have those; the start date is when the contributions start, and the period is how often they’re removed from the “other tags”/”general income” envelope and added to the specified envelope.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Wm Tanksley: you explained better what I tried to say! :) That is, that money goes to a general income envelope and from there automatically or manually to each envelope. And it’s only taken out of an envelope when I have an expense of that kind, or if I decide to move money from one envelope to another where I think it is needed better-
That is, fixed expenses like rent, and expenses that are nearly the same every month (like food) I can put to the “rent” and “food” tags automatically each month. When I’m saving up to buy a new TV, I can put a certain amount from the “general income” tag to the “TV” tag, whenever I see that there is money available.
If I overspend in a certain category (tag), I will have to take that extra money from the “general income” envelope, since an envelope never really can turn red (which would mean I owe someone money or I have to take it from elsewhere).
And I agree with others, I love the great community feeling of Buxfer and that the developes take their community seriously. I’m sure something great will turn out of this envelope budgeting feature too! :)
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
So I played around with the new budgets a bit, and I think that I was a bit confused about the sub-item budgets. Say that I have a main tag for Auto that has two tags under it - Fuel and Service. I would like to make one budget for Fuel and another budget for Service, and then it would show the amount for the Auto budget as the sum of Fuel and Service.
Take a look at this screenshot from Quicken to see what I am talking about:
http://z.about.com/d/financialsoft/1/0/W/7/Enter_Budget_Amounts_in_Quicken.png
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Since the envelopes method needs a few more features before it becomes better than the old budgeting mechanism (specifying periods and rollover), I switched back to the old version.
Unfortunately it seems that a change to the interface has made the budgeting tools a bit harder to use. The links on the budget to go back and forth between the periods has a bit strange of behavior when you have items that have mixed period lengths. For instance we have several budget items that are yearly along with budget items that are monthly. Changing to the previous period changes the yearly items to last year and the monthly items to last month. Would it be possible to only change the items on a timeline specific basis (like monthly or yearly) similar to how the report works? We like to go back and see how we did compared to our budget.
Thanks for responding to the comments!
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Kristen,
You can create a budget for Auto. That’s all we support right now.
And the old budgets work exactly as they did before. Including the period switching .. nothing’s changed there.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I really like the new envelope budgets — they’ve got rough edges and tons of potential, but even as they stand they’re an excellent feature, and the zero-based budgeting lets me rest assured that I’m not mysteriously missing a category, like I had to worry with the old budgets.
I found a workaround to make the current envelopes work kinda like I wanted. I just set my budgets up for six months at a time, with a total equaling my average six-month expenditure (I have a year of data now), and the moving line lets me know when I’m messing up; every once in a while I change an actual expenditure to the “wrong” envelope in order to keep things roughly balanced. Yes, it’s REALLY bad accounting, but it means I get a red-envelope warning in time to save my budgets.
Good!
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 am
P.S. I’m not saying I don’t want improvement! See my above posts for details on what I want. I’m just saying that the new envelope budgets are really cool and I’m very happy with them.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
Shashank,
Thanks for the reply! Sorry that I missed the period switching there before, I guess I never looked there until the pagination was put in.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:46 am
Kristen: yes, the period switching’s been in there for a while — it made the old budgets FAR harder to use. I don’t get why they did it; they also disabled the forward and back buttons on the budget detail screens (although you could still view past periods by clicking on the bargraph).
I’m sure the new budgets will be much nicer; already I like them more.
November 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
After being busy for awhile and coming back to play some more here, I’m having some trouble understanding this as an envelope-based system. It just seems like a budgeting system with the addition of a balance-focused measurement.
Is the idea that you are adjusting each tag’s limit as you receive income? And subtracting a little from one tag and adding to another as you go?
As far as I understand, the real crux of envelope-based budgeting is that you have a set amount of income, and you put it in envelopes. When you run out of income in an envelope, you either can’t spend any more on that item or must take it from another envelope. This way you can never overspend. I realize some flexibility is needed as we are dealing with virtual money, but…
It seems a few things lack for an envelope-based system:
• Your amount of income that you can distribute is not readily available on the page.
• You don’t actually choose to allocate your income to envelopes, you just budget a certain amount for a tag. (Although you can adjust these based on income, the two are not tied closely together, it seems.)
• There is no easily-available way to move allotted income from one envelope to another.
• Your “All items” limit is based on how much you say is in each envelope, not how much you actually have. (Which brings up the possibility of licensing this to the government. They love that kind of math.)
I think this works fantastic as a budgeting-system; I think the interface is great, the month progress line is fantastic and that it’s a huge step from the previous system. I just don’t see it as an envelope system as advertised.
I reserve the right to redact all of these comments if there is something fundamental I’m misunderstanding or not seeing. Thoughts?
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
It seems if I just enable rolling over of previous budget balances, most of the gripes here will be resolved.
1: Money disappearing out of the envelope — that won’t happen because money is rolled over
2: Saving for future expenses — let’s say you want to set aside $1000 for something that is 4 months away, instead you choose to set aside $250 per month. And since the balance is rolled over, the balance in this budget at the end of 4 months will be $1000.
3: If an envelope goes red (which can’t happen in a real world, but can happen in our online world), it just draws from the money you put into it the next month. I understand one option here would be (as Josh says) to transfer money from another envelope. That is a good option, but I don’t see it being very critical at the moment, unless I am missing something.
4: Instead of funding an envelope, you set a limit (or you set aside that much money) for a spending category. I realize this might not feel comfortable to you guys, but I think a vast majority of users think of setting limits when it comes to budgeting. They don’t care if they understand envelope budgeting or not .. so in their interest, I think setting limits is a better metaphor when it comes to operating budgets.
Finally, I don’t want to be thinking like “Okay, envelope budgeting is supposed to have feature X, Y and Z. So let me just build X, Y and Z”. Envelope budgeting requires a certain learning curve, and I want to understand what parts of it are critically important, and not build something overly bloated so that users not familiar with envelope budgeting can also use the system just fine.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Or I guess one other way to handle envelopes going red + planning future expenses is to create a different type of budgets — called ‘Saving budgets’. You put $x into it per month, but there are no expenses incurred directly from that budget. In case some of your envelopes go red, these saving budgets are charged a penalty equal to the amount overspent.
You can keep watching how much your savings balance is and figure out when its time to party next. Does that sound reasonable?
That way, the envelope funding and transferring parts remain separate from the rest of the system and I don’t have to complicate the basic interface for beginners who just want to say “Help me spend less than 400 a month on food”
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Shashank, I think with rollovers and the like, you’re going to confuse folks not familiar with the envelope method. I think the method you have is very suitable for the needs of most people, and if you’re going to offer a fully-functional envelope system, it would serve users better as an option as opposed to a default.
You have a great system, no doubt. And I think nearly everyone will be happy with it. I think the only problems are coming with calling it an envelope system while it does not really follow the traditional ideals of an envelope system. And I think if you go too much towards a true envelope system, there will be a larger barrier for entry for your average non-envelope budgeter.
I want to reiterate again how much I like the solution you have now and say thanks for your transparency in this process!
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
I have to agree; that’ll give the most value returned per effort spent.
Oh, and you should also make it impossible to mess up one’s budgets by changing their durations.
There are 4 options:
1. Let it stay red;
2. Raise its current level (by lowering another envelope’s level)
3. Change or split an expense in it to another category
4. Hope that next month’s funding will turn it green.
#1 is not usually acceptable; a red envelope is a REALLY bad thing. #4 is not a good idea in an envelope system; ideally, you’re supposed to use the envelopes to control your spending. Hypothetically, if the money isn’t in your envelope, it’s not in your possession.
Limits remove the reward for tightening your belt and saving for the future; they also make it much harder to handle variable categories, except by expanding the budgetary period over MANY months so the variations average out.
Agreed… it would make sense to have a single “savings envelope”. The savings envelope would include the total cash balance of all your accounts, minus the total money in all your other envelopes.
I posted about this in my comment from November 1st, 2008 at 11:21 pm, in which I called it a “general income” account.
Note that in envelope budgeting the sum of all envelopes (including the single savings envelope) is always equal to the total amount of money in your accounts.
I’m not sure how to handle new income, though. It would make sense to spread it over all envelopes proportional to the envelope’s funding; if too little comes in to cover an expense that doesn’t exceed the envelope’s funding for the period, move money from the savings envelope; if more comes in than expected, ignore the overfunded envelopes when distributing the money. The goal is that by the end of every period, Buxfer makes sure that exactly that amount of money goes from income into that envelope.
Point taken. We don’t want to force people to spend enormous amounts of time dragging and dropping or tweaking amounts. On the other hand, we don’t want to leave people wondering whether they left out some category, or whether they’re falling behind and not noticing it… Or to make it really easy to set up, but useless after a month.
I’ll stop now; I’ve got other things to do.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Hi,
First, sorry for my english, I’m french ;)
I used to use Buxfer since a couple of days and I explore a lot about tags and all stuffs possible to do.
Then, I created a tag named “fixed charged” included loan, phone, assurance, subway… Usually, this tag amount should be constant month after month.
I saw that the last budget line (by reading this blog) maybe correspond to all I earn in the month. So, it could be interresting to substract the “fixed charged” to this total.
Thanks for your work.
Moreover, I think that it will be great to have the possibility to choose a “save rate” (for example 10%) on this total budget line.
If you don’t understand me very well, I can try to explain a little more my ideas.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
I have made both these changes:
a) enabled rolling over of budget balances to the next period (of course, rollovers will start from the next period onwards, if you have a previous rollover balance, you can just set the current budget limit appropriately)
b) fixed the budgeting period to 1 month
I have also taken off the “Other tags” and “All tags” budgets, since they confused the hell out of most users. I will move on to tackling the other issues (viz., envelopes going red, having savings envelopes for future expenses)
November 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Thanks for the hard work on the budgets! I’m going to try out the updated envelope budgets tonight, but I also wanted to say thanks for removing the pagination with the budgets and putting in a sort on the old view!
November 5th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Ok, I couldn’t wait until tonight to see a bit of the new envelope budget stuff, and I’m excited about the rollover feature. One thing I’m a bit sad to see go is the All Tags because then I could compare it to our total income. Someone else wondered if it would be possible on that screen to show all income so that when you create your budget it would be zero-based. It would be really great to have that.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Yes, I am working on that too. But until I find a good way to do it, I thought its better I take off the half-baked “All tags” and “Other tags”
November 5th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
As others have said, I did like having the sum total… It’s reassuring to see both total expenditure and total income, and see how they match. But I’m sure you have better planned.
What you’re doing is awesome, and really sets Buxfer apart as a user-responsive service. I hope you make a TON of money from it.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Okay, I’ve used the newer new budgets :) for a little while; here’s my reactions.
* Initially I wasn’t too thrilled about the one-month-only restriction, but I’ve come to like the simplicity. Good decision.
* I don’t like how my budgets turn red as soon as my mortgage gets paid (at the beginning of every month). This isn’t a disaster, since it’s very clear when the monthly quota is absolutely exceeded.
* I can’t tell yet, but please reassure me that when carryover happens, it doesn’t compound the monthly amount added to the envelope. (Wouldn’t “monthly amount” be a better name than “limit”? After all, with carryover the limit will change every month.)
* Next, please reassure me :-) that the next release will allow me to set the amount currently in the envelope, so that by budgets don’t overrun when I first create them. That way my “yearly” envelope won’t overflow this month (I get a TON of predictable yearly and quarterly expenses that I’ve been faithfully setting aside for).
Great work; I’m happy with what we’ve got. I’m always greedy for more… But clearly Buxfer is now the closest of your competitors to a workable financial management program, even though when I started using it I only chose it because it was the only one to support CSV import.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I agree with others that this feature is stating to become more and more useful. Thanks for that!
A couple of questions/suggestions:
1) How will I know how much is “available” that is not part of other envelopes, now that “Other tags” is gone? That is, what is left of my income after I have I put aside money in different envelopes/tags.
2) I think it would be great if the start of the budget period could be set by the user. It would be good if the period starts when the salary comes, since that determines how much money I can put in the different envelopes. Otherwise I’d have to, like Wm Tanksley points out, kind of manually calculate how the envelopes will look at the end of the month.
This would reflect how “real-world envelope budgeting” works, when the money comes in is when it goes to the envelopes. I can’t put money in an envelope that will come later in the month.
Thanks for some great work indeed!
November 7th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Perhaps once rollovers start taking effect, it will be useful to have two columns: “Monthly Limit” and “Envelope Total” so people can try and stay within a monthly total but still see how much they have saved. So you can save within a certain tag but also not spend over a certain amount per month.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:01 am
When do the rollovers start taking effect? I tried going to January and entering the budgets in so that they would start from January, but it doesn’t look like that worked. Since we have budget items that are yearly, I am going to have to wait until January of next year to start I think.
November 7th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I mentioned a while ago that I wasn’t entirely happy with my envelopes turning red when my mortgage got paid (usually on the 1st); I thought of another, much more complex but possible solution: to use planned expenses (repeating expenses and bill reminders) to estimate how far the bar should move, rather than just guessing at a constant spending level.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Rollovers only work with the new budgeting system. For technical reasons, I am not able to provide this feature for the earlier system (which is what seems you are using, since you mention yearly budgets)
November 8th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
No, I was referring to the new budgeting system. I’ve been switching back and forth to try them out. What I was meaning is that I have certain budgets that are for yearly expenses, but would be paid every month into the budget so that when it came time to pay the bill, we had already allocated money for it. This is useful for things like Auto Maintenance, or Medical Bills. What I was attempting to do was go to January and enter the budget item in and was hoping that the money would carry over through the months until November, but I didn’t notice any of the budgets rolling over, which is why I asked.
November 8th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I see. Unfortunately, the rollover starts only from now onwards .. since we don’t know when the previous budgets were created and when to start applying rollovers on them.
I guess you could just compute your balance until now and set that as the current limit?
November 8th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll have to figure out how to make it work, but I’m sure I can.
November 8th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Wouldn’t that make the “current limit” almost double next month, when this month’s leftovers cascade into next month?
-Wm
November 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
You guys should take a look at “Budget” from Snowmint Creative Solutions (http://www.snowmintcs.com/products/budgetwin/index.php) to get a good idea of how envelop budgeting works. They do it really well.
November 10th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Whatever happened to the ‘other tags’ and ‘all tags’ in the envelop budgeting model? I found them to be extremely useful.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Max, the missing tags were removed just a few days ago — they apparently confused too many people, I’m not sure why (I didn’t see anyone complaining, perhaps they were reported as bugs or something). I liked ‘em.
Shashank says there’ll be something better, so we’ll see what happens. Personally, I can’t imagine what could be better… It seems ideal to have both a “leftovers” and a “total picture” that are 100% certain to be accurate.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I love this feature. It’s simple, and let us follow our budgets at a glance. We’re using it for monthly budgeting (with rollover for some tags, so we can save for more expensive items), with tags such as ’software & media’, ‘eating out’, and ‘games’.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Awesome!! The budgeting looks pretty much perfect now. Well, except maybe one tiny thing… Will there be a way to set a “starting balance” from the moment I create a budget? Or a starting date? I started using Buxfer in August, and have saved/spent in/from a number of budgets and I have no idea how to make Buxfer reflect the current total using.
Let’s say I put aside 75 aside for clothing each month, starting in August. In November I have put aside a total of 300. In August and October I spent 50 and 90 respectively, so at the end of November there should be 160 my clothing budget. How do I make the budget display this left-over amount in my budget/envelope?
I understand that the roll-over will only take effect from today. That’s no problem, but a starting budget would give the app an amount to roll over *from*, rather than just zero. Any chance of this feature, or perhaps a workaround?
Cheers!
November 22nd, 2008 at 2:29 am
YOU DREW THE LITTLE LINE! I’m in love with that little line, representing the day of the current month, to help me gage whether I am spending within my average means. This was the ONLY reason I still wandered over to Mint every couple of weeks, and I remember sending Buxfer a note suggesting it. So cool to see popular requests become a reality within a short period of time - This site is really about pleasing the users, I love it!
Bye bye, Mint!
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:01 am
How can i roll over negative balances also
December 9th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
About negative balances: I don’t have a solution… I’m not getting much use out of the new budgets yet, but I think they’re very promising.
Please may we be allowed to edit the current balance as well as the monthly “limit”? I think this would do the most toward making the envelopes immediately useful.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I was just wondering if it is possible to adjust budget dates so that they are not constrained to a 1st through to 31st treatment…. I get paid on the 23rd of each month and I like to set my budget to run from the 23rd through to the 22nd of the following month….
January 7th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Caroline, I suspect you might find it easier to work with the old-style budgets; they can have start dates, and really, they’re more appropriate for measuring burn rates. I’m still working out what the new budgets are good for… I like them, but without the ability to distribute the current balance among envelopes they’re REALLY hard to use.
One thing that helps: try just setting up envelopes for the categories you NEED to control, and use the “Projections” report to control the rest. Just set up “Bill Reminders” for your paycheck (as Income, of course), and for all your yearly and monthly bills; then run a Projections report, starting tomorrow and running for 3-12 months (warning: never set the start date to earlier than tomorrow, the report produces complete gibberish). I then computed my average daily spending for everything EXCEPT my yearly and monthly bills and entered a “Bill Reminder” for that (occurring every day, you’ll probably want to turn off email reminders).
And bingo, the Projections report became useful. Later on I broke things down on an account-by-account basis so that I can use the Projections report to see when any specific account will be in danger.
There are tons of things to watch out for with the Projections… It can’t tell when a Bill Warning hasn’t actually been paid, so it’ll look like you have more money than you actually do. It won’t include “Pending” transactions in the past (like checks that haven’t been cashed yet). And as I mentioned, if you put its start date earlier than tomorrow it’ll be nonsense, and if you set it too far in the future it doesn’t have enough data to be reliable (both could be fixed, but I’ve no doubt there are more urgent things). But in general, it works very well.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Is it possible to have an initial balance for your budget when starting for the first time?
January 9th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Awn: no. It’s also not possible to set a balance in any useful way. I’ve tried allowing the “limit” to be my desired balance, letting it roll over, and then changing the “limit” to my desired amount; that doesn’t work, because changing the “limit” automatically resets the balance.
Really, to make this feature usable, we must be able to edit the “current balance” at the same time that we set the “monthly allowance” for each envelope (and the term “limit” shouldn’t be used).
I’m just about ready to disable roll-over; it seems like a really neat idea, but the lack of control over balance makes it worthless. With the loss of rollover, it’s looking more and more like new-style “envelope” budgets are an almost total loss (there’s absolutely no meaning to “envelopes” that don’t have a “current balance”).
SO darn close. I really like the “today line”. I like every single part of it, except for the seemingly minor lack of “current balance”.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I concur with Tanksley. The current balance is a key necessity of envelopes. I do envelopes and buxfer has come the closest to allowing me to do this online - but allowing to modify current balance would help so much more!
I’m not giving up on you guys. Cheers.