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.
Creating a budget
In creating a budget, you must ensure you can see all categories, not just the ones that currently have an expense item against them.
To see all categories:
1. In your portal, click on your profile at the top of the page and select Settings
2. Choose Wealth and Cashflow settings
3. In the screen, ensure you UNTICK Categories with transactions only. This will ensure you can view and edit all categories in your file.
NOTE: Once you have completed your budget preparation, ensure you return to the settings area and re-tick the Categories with transaction only in order to see things clearer and reduce $0 values in your reports.
To Prepare the Budget:
Navigate to the budget view. By default, the Cashflow area displays the last 30 days of income and expenses, sorted by category. To access the budget view, click on the “View” drop-down (top left of the section) and select “By budget”.
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).
- 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. - Expand the Expenses area, and complete the budget calculations for each spending category.
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. For more information on views and filters in the Cashflow area of your portal, click here.
NOTE: The following categories will not show in the Budget view: Credit card payments, retirement calculations, savings, security trades, transfers, uncategorised.