Envelope budgeting
Give every bit of your cash a job. Spending budgets become envelopes, what no envelope holds shows as To assign, and moving money between envelopes never moves it between accounts.
Envelope budgeting is another way to read the same budgets. Instead of "how much of the limit is left", each spending budget becomes an envelope holding money, and the cash nothing holds yet is To assign. Nothing about your accounts or your ledger changes.
Turning it on
It's off until an owner, admin, manager, or accountant turns it on in Settings → Workspace → Envelope budgeting. Turning it off later changes no figures: money you moved between envelopes stays in their limits.
To assign
The top of Plan → Budgets shows To assign: the money in your cash accounts that no envelope holds yet. It's worked out as:
- the settled balances of your chequing, savings, and cash accounts in your base currency,
- minus what's owed on credit cards,
- minus money reserved in those accounts for goals and other things (see budgets, goals, and safe to spend),
- minus what your envelopes still hold.
The line under it shows each part. If To assign falls below zero, it says how much more you've assigned than you have.
Envelopes
Every spending budget in your base currency is an envelope. Its figure is what's available: what's assigned to it this period, plus what rolled over, less what was spent. Income targets and budgets in another currency stay under Other budgets, read the usual way.
Envelopes count settled spending only, so the Realized and Total switch isn't shown; what isn't final yet appears as "not final yet" on the envelope.
- Assign puts money from To assign into an envelope.
- Move from… takes money from To assign or from another envelope. An envelope can't give more than it holds.
- Overspent? The envelope says by how much. When To assign or a single envelope can cover it, Cover overspending from… moves exactly that much in one step.
Assigning and moving change the envelopes' limits for this period only. Each move is kept as its own record and can't be edited, and the money stays in your accounts: no transaction is recorded. Owners, admins, managers, and editors can assign and move.
At the end of a period, each envelope follows its budget's rollover choice: what's left returns to To assign, carries over, or carries over along with any overspending.
Rates
Envelopes are in your base currency. Spending in another currency is converted at the rate of its own day, and a figure that's missing a rate ends in "*". See amounts and precision.