Improved budgeting …
February 9th, 2009 by ShashankFolks,
We have released a few important updates to the way budgets work:
- You can set different limits for different months. Some months are more costly, due to some unforeseen expenses. You can now bump up the limit only for that month. Just edit the limit for a budget as usual, the edit will apply only to the current month. Past months will not be affected
- Returns and refunds are accounted in budgets. If you enter transactions manually, use the new ‘Refund’ type for transactions. If you sync/import from the bank, you can click on the transaction and ‘Mark it as a refund’.
- You can start/stop a budget. Clicking ‘Delete’ for a budget only stops it from the current month onwards. Past months are not affected
Hope this improves your budgeting experience! :)
February 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was hoping for, and thanks for the speedy response!
February 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
that’s is just great..thanks
February 9th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Fantastic!
I love how quickly you were able to get these issues resolved and get a working solution for the returns/reimbursements.
Thanks a million!
February 9th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Please! I would love to have the same period for budgets and the rest of my reports. I can see everithing starts on day 15 of every month, except the budgets, that starts on 1th.
February 9th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Freeman, please be careful what you ask for — the report period is variable, and I myself change it all the time. I don’t want my budget periods changing just because I needed to view a broader report. The envelope budgets used to work this way, and it was REALLY bad.
What you want — quite reasonably, IMO — is the ability to set a custom period for the budget.
-Wm
February 9th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
This IS nice… But I, as usual, ran into a problem (caused by my own past actions). I tried to use rollover budgets, then gave up for a few months (due to the problems you just fixed, yay!). BUT, I left the budgets on rollover, and now I can’t figure out how to reduce the amount that’s in them.
Is there some official way to clear a budget?
February 9th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
What if you edit the budget and disable rollover? Doesn’t that work?
Else the way to clear something would be to delete the budget and re-create it …
February 10th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Ah, disabling and then enabling rollover works. Thanks again, Shashank; I’ll be fiddling with this new toy for a while. It look like a winner. Although I still want the ability to edit the current balances, I’ll find a way to do without.
February 10th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
This is awesome. Thank you for adding this!
February 11th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Is this in the new version of budgets or the old. It does not work for me
February 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I see it is in the new version. But why can i not change the limits for the other months. My tagged income has stopped distributing to the budgets and when I got back, everything is red. Did you all turn off the feature to add income to budgets by tagging? Mine never reflected in the budget balance. It would just be green and stay at 0 until i went over.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Yes, its in the new version.
Only refunds affect budgets, not incomes. That is by design.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I was wrong — disabling and enabling rollover does NOT zero the rollover balance. In fact, deleting and the recreating the envelope doesn’t do it. I can’t figure out HOW to do it.
(The reason I made that mistake was that my budgets were sorted by amount — they were moving around while I edited them, and I didn’t even know it. Note to self: always sort by name while editing budgets. :-)
February 11th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
In the old version, when I split income to different tags it did reflect in the budgets. It just stopped all together yesterday and screwed up all my past months budgets.
and can we not change the budget limits for previous months in the new version?
February 11th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
The new refund functionality is awesome. I have a ‘Refund’ tag, and I just converted all the ‘Income’ in it into refunds, and then retagged everything into the tag it should originally have been in. Also tagged my tax refunds and put them in my ‘Paycheck’ category (where they should have been if I’d filled my W-4 in correctly).
February 11th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I’m having a pretty hard time with the rollover functionality — it turns out that I’ve got a ‘Yearly’ budget that due to a typo has $16,000 in its balance. Am I totally out of luck here, or is there some way to clear that balance without destroying the rollover functionality?
February 13th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Shashank. Thanks so much for the updates to the budgets. The ability to mark transactions as refunds is great. Thanks!
February 21st, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Really frustrating trying to figure out the Budget screen. I wish the help was more thorough. Anyway, can anyone explain the following: When I click ‘budgets’ I get some columns, the one after ‘tags’ has two arrows on it. Between these is the date ‘Feb 9′. Why is the date Feb 9 there???
Also, I can’t seem to find anyway to set any of the supposed budget settings (’new’ and ‘old’ budget systems, ‘variable report period’, etc).
Thanks for any help. I am so far disappointed with ‘get satisfaction’ the few times I have used it for different services, but I’ll post this there also.
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
I understand — I’m taking a long, long time to figure them out, too. My particular love/hate is the rollover — I’ve got budgets that absolutely require it, but I can’t figure out how to control it.
“When I click ‘budgets’ I get some columns, the one after ‘tags’ has two arrows on it. Between these is the date ‘Feb 9?. Why is the date Feb 9 there???”
That’s not “9″; it’s “09″. It’s the year.
“Also, I can’t seem to find anyway to set any of the supposed budget settings (’new’ and ‘old’ budget systems, ‘variable report period’, etc).”
The budget settings are in the upper right corner of the Budget screen, just above the “Sort By” box. I don’t know what a variable report period is; I don’t recall having heard of it. Normally the reports are variable — you set the start and period right underneath the graph.
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Why have my budgets for previous months disappeared. We just finished February and If had five budgets set up in February and since we are now in March, when I click to view Feb budgets, I can only see one or two budgets. And the same with all the previous budgets except one or two are gone in the prior months.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I’m disappointed that the rollovers are still stuck at huge values, in spite of me having those budgets set to non-rollover during the month end. Looks like I still can’t use rollovers.
Actually, I did think of one way: I can create entirely an new category, move the old category under it, budget the new category the same as the old, and then delete the old one. If I want I could then rename the new category to match the old. This worked, but then I got bored :-). I still wish it were possible to just type in the amount of money I want as rollover.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Sorry about that. I am working on something that might fix this. Stay tuned.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
EP,
Can you email support AT buxfer with more details?
March 16th, 2009 at 5:59 am
I just discovered Buxfer and I can’t wait to give it a go tonight - I love budgeting!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
We have finally fixed this problem. Just edit your budget and you will be able to set start date/balance for rollovers.
March 26th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Wow, Shashank, that’s really, really impressive. You guys went above and beyond. And the new interface is pleasant too… My favorite is how you split the Projection into its own tab rather than making it a report (good call). I have more to say, but I’m sure you’ll make a more topical main post that I can comment on.
Awesome job.
March 7th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Looks like it’s been a while since anyone has commented on this post. But….it seems like this function is not working for previous months. I am not able to change the budget for the current month and future. For example: I started setting up my budget in March of 2010. I have a budget of $175 for Auto Fuel each month. In January of 2010, I traveled more so I need to increase my budget to $200 for January but keep it the same for the other months. It doesn’t allow me to go back and change a budget. Is it possible to have this interface inserted in the edit budget page? It would be helpful. Thanks.