Setting a budget

A budget here starts as one number: what you are willing to spend in a month on evaluations, resets, data, subscriptions and everything else the funding habit costs. Underneath it you can put a ceiling on any single kind of spend. Both are set from Portfolio › Budget, through the Set budget button in the page toolbar or any category tile on the page, which open the same drawer.

The point of a budget is the breach, so set one you would actually stop at. A ceiling chosen to be comfortable never produces one, and it tells you nothing on the month you cross it.

A budget stands until you change it

It is not a figure you re-enter every month. A ceiling applies from the month you set it and carries into every later month until you replace it, set five thousand in March and August still reads five thousand. The drawer says which month the change applies from, and warns you when the budget currently in force was stated in an earlier month.

The drawer always applies from the month you are in, and there is no control anywhere for choosing a different one. A month that has already closed cannot be restated at all: rewriting a past ceiling would rewrite an over-budget verdict you have already acted on, which is the opposite of what a record is for.

Having never set a budget and having set one of zero are kept as different things, because they want opposite screens. Zero is a real budget, and it means spend nothing.

The four tiles

• Monthly budget: the ceiling in force for the month you are looking at.
• Spent: what has actually gone out, with the number of expenses behind it.
• Remaining: the difference, and how many days until the month resets.
• Used: what you have spent as a share of the ceiling, Spent over Monthly budget, the same figure the dial beneath draws.

Remaining goes negative when you are over, and is not clamped to zero. Hiding a breach would defeat the only thing a ceiling is for.

What counts as Spent

Successful expense-type transactions in the month, plus those rows’ own fees. Three things are deliberately outside it, and each exclusion is a judgement rather than an omission.

• Pending is not counted: it is tracked separately. A charge that has not settled has not been spent.
• Transfers are not counted: moving your own money to your bank is not spending it.
• The fee on a payout is not counted: it arrives with income and shrinks it, rather than being money you chose to spend. The Accounts page does count it, because that page is answering what a firm has cost you in total.

The All expenses table beneath is not a separate book, it is your Portfolio ledger filtered to the expense types, so it is showing exactly the rows that produced the Spent figure above it. If the two ever look like they disagree, the rows are the answer.

Per-category ceilings

The month’s ceiling is not the only budget you can set. The Budget drawer lists the ledger’s whole expense vocabulary, not just the categories you have already touched, and each line takes a ceiling of its own over the spend already through it. Setting one on a category that has never been budgeted creates it there and then, so there is nothing to set up first.

You can also add a category of your own with a name and a colour, and remove one you no longer want. A category you add is yours: the colour you pick is stored, so it draws in that colour everywhere it appears rather than in a neutral tone. Every category tile on the page opens the same drawer, and so does the Set budget button in the toolbar, so there is one surface behind all of them.

A ceiling belongs to a month, exactly as the whole-month one does. Category Insights ranks whatever you have set against what you have actually spent, so it has something to say as soon as one category has both.

The All expenses toolbar underneath works too: its search box, its category and platform filters and its pager all re-read the ledger. It is the same rows Portfolio › Transactions holds, narrowed to the expense types.

The spending trend beside the tiles is real, and it is drawn weekly, the average beside it is a per-week figure, and it shows nothing rather than a zero when there is no spending to average.