Planning
Setting what you expect each category to do per month, and reading actuals against it as the year fills in.
The planning view is a grid: categories down the side, months across the top, your expected figure in each cell.
Plan against actual
As months pass, actuals fill in beside the plan and the difference is the report. Past months show what happened; future months show what you expected. That is the whole mechanic, and it is enough — most budgeting failures are not arithmetic, they are never looking.
The month view
For a single month, planning reconciles the two ends:
- Net worth at the start of the month
- What came in and what went out, by category
- Unassigned — movement not yet categorised, which is the honest residual rather than a rounding-away
- Currency change effect — the part that was exchange rates
- Net worth at the end, and the change
The unassigned line is the one to watch. A large one means the month's categorising is not finished, and every other figure on the page should be read with that in mind.
Levels
Plan items can be organised into levels, configured in wallet settings, for when a flat list of categories is not the way you think about a budget.
Cleaning up
Plans accumulate rows for categories you stopped using. There are operations to clear a plan and to drop unused items; both delete, so both ask first.