Managing Budgets

Creating Budgets

To create a new account - Select the Menu menu then Create Budget.

Type the name of the account you want to create, and press OK. That budget will now appear in the list of budgets on the main screen.

HINT: See if you can give your budgets names that start with different letters of the alphabet... If you do, you can make entering transactions quicker. On the Transaction Form, when you select from the "To Budget" or "From Budget" field, just type the first letter of the budget, and the combo box will go straight to that value.

Viewing Budgets

When you click on the account in the list of budgets, you will be able to see the (non-cleared) transactions inbudget that .   If you click on a transaction inbudget that , you can view the details of the transaction on the right hand side of the transaction list.

The toolbar functions in the budget view are:

Editing Budgets

If you want to change the name of an budget, press the Settings button.

You can also set a target amount to spend on the budget and track how you are going against that.

Lets say that you wanted to spend no more than $300 on takeaway each week.

From now on, the budget amount will be highlighted in the budget list.

If you no longer want to monitor a budget, set the interval drop-down to None.

Balancing Budgets

See Balancing Accounts (Balancing budgets works in the same way as balancing accounts).

Closing Budgets

When you no longer want to be able to enter transactions against a budget, you can close that budget. The budget will still exist, but you will no longer be able to select that budget when you are entering new transactions.

To close a budget, you must have:

To actually close the budget, edit the budget (by pressing Settings) then press the Lock button.

Once you have closed an budget, it will no longer be visible in the list of open budgets, but will be shown under "X Budgets".

If you closed a budget by accident, edit it and press the  Unlock button.

Deleting Budgets

Budgets can only be deleted when there are no transactions for that budget (otherwise, confusion will reign). You will need to move ALL transactions out of a budget before the system will let you delete it. Once there are no transactions, edit the budget (by pressing the Settingsbutton) then press the Delete button.