Budgets, goals, reservations, and safe to spend
Budgets read straight from your ledger, goals and reservations set money aside without moving it, and safe to spend shows what's left once bills and savings are covered.
None of these keep their own copy of your transactions. They read the ledger, so a budget, a goal, and a report always agree.
Budgets
A budget is either a spending limit or an income target, over one or more categories, every week, month, quarter, or year. Picking a group such as Food covers everything in it. Transfers and card payments never touch a category, so they never count against a budget.
- Used is what was settled in the period in the Realized view. Switch to Total to include what's pending or expected, such as a bill your recurring items expect.
- Budgets are in your base currency. Activity in another currency is converted at the rate of its own day. Activity with no rate is left out, and the budget says it's incomplete.
- When a period ends, a spending limit can start fresh, carry what's left, or carry both ways (overspending comes out of the next period). Carry-over counts settled activity only.
Say your groceries budget is 600.00 CAD a month and you've settled 412.30 CAD of groceries so far. The budget shows 187.70 CAD left. A pending −35.00 CAD purchase is counted only in Total, where it shows as not final yet.
There's no grand total across budgets, because two budgets can share a category.
Goals
A goal is a target, such as 5,000.00 CAD for a trip, optionally by a date. You choose which accounts count toward it. Progress comes from those accounts' settled balances, less money reserved there for something else. With a date, FullFi tells you about how much to save each month to get there. Nothing moves when you create or remove a goal.
Reservations
A reservation sets money aside inside an account without moving it: 1,200.00 CAD in savings for car insurance, for example, or money for a goal. Your balances don't change. Safe to spend leaves reserved money alone.
If an account's balance falls below what's set aside there, the oldest reservations are covered first and the newest go uncovered, and the Goals page says how much is short.
Safe to spend
Safe to spend, on your dashboard, answers "how much can I spend before my next income without missing a bill?" It's worked out in your base currency like this:
- Cash: today's settled balances in your chequing, savings, and cash accounts,
- minus what you owe on credit cards,
- minus what's due before your next income: pending and expected payments, and your recurring bills,
- minus money reserved in those accounts,
- minus your safety buffer, which you set in Settings.
The period runs until your next expected income, or the next 30 days when there's none. Expected income is never added until it arrives. The card shows each line under "How this is worked out", so you can check the figure.
Accounts and bills in other currencies aren't part of safe to spend. If you have no chequing, savings, or cash account in your base currency, the card doesn't appear.
See also Realized and Total.