Create budgets to better track how much you’re earning and spending every month. To enable budgets, start by linking your financial accounts to pull in live transaction data. Your portal will automatically pre-populate a budget for each transaction category, based on your current data averaged over an annual value.
Before you begin.....
When creating a budget, you must ensure you can see all categories, not just the ones that currently have an expense item against them.
1. Navigate to 'Financial'>'Cashflow' from the menu on the left of your portal
2. In the Cashflow area, click 'Cashflow settings'.
3. Untick the 'Categories with transactions only' setting. This will ensure you can view and edit all transaction categories, regardless if there are transactions beloning to them or not.
NOTE: Once you have completed your budget preparation, ensure you return to the settings area and re-tick the 'Categories with transaction only' setting in order to see things clearer and reduce $0 values in your reports.
To create/edit the Budget:
1. Back in the Cashflow area, to access the budget view change the first filter to 'By budget'.
2. To account for a variety of payment schedules (e.g. anything from monthly groceries to yearly insurance payments), we recommend creating a full financial year budget.
Change the time period filter from “Last 30 days” to “Custom Filter” and create a financial year view by setting the dates from the 1st of July to 30th June of the next year (e.g. 01/07/2019 to 30/06/2020).
3. Click on the Income section and enter the expected amount of income you’ll get during the year for each category. You can use Monthly budget and the system will automatically calculate the annual value.
NOTE: The progress bar correlates to the calculated budget. The calculated budget changes if filters are selected. If monthly budget figures are adjusted, the change will only reflect once the page has been refreshed.
4. Expand the Expenses area, and complete the budget calculations for each spending category.
5. The colour bars indicate whether you are on track (green), close to your allocated amount (orange) or if you are over budget (red).
Once you have set your annual budget, you can modify the filters to view budgets for the time period of your choice.
NOTE: The following categories will not show in the Budget view: Credit card payments, retirement calculations, savings, security trades, transfers, uncategorised.