I want to track what our AVERAGE monthly budget expenses are and make my monthly budget look more balanced. Annual payments make the monthly budget look off because these larger bills are entered into monthly budget equally divided into 12 months. I have certain large bills divided over 12 months, but I pay them annually (i.e. home insurance, quarterly taxes, property tax). What is best way to make months balance, but have expenses spread out to best “estimate” general montly budget needs (including the savings for these annual bills)? Or do you take that budget portion of the upcoming bill and put in a separate place until you pay the annual or quarterly bill? For example, there is a monthly line item for our quarterly estimated tax item, but we only actually pay that 4x/year.
Hello and welcome @egsink!
There’s a solution that aims to help with this called Savings Budget. This sheet is similar to the Monthly Budget sheet. The best thing to do is go to that link and watch the video that @randy put together to get a sense of how to use it.
But a quick explanation is that you would download this sheet into your foundations template solution. Then, on the Categories sheet, set the Track column to Savings for those expenses that you budget for monthly, but do not pay monthly.
Then you just don’t make any purchases toward those categories until it’s time for the actual payments. The Savings Budget sheet will keep track of the money you budgeted toward the category for the prior months, but didn’t spend. That balance will be available for each subsequent month, increasing the “amount available”. Then, when it’s time to pay said bill, there is enough in the Savings column to cover it and keep the red lines from appearing.
They will still appear on other sheets, like Monthly Budget, but this sheet will kind of replace that one anyway.
Did you have a look at the Savings Budget as @1Email2RuleThemAll suggested, @egsink?
Did you find it helpful?
yes i did! I need to rewatch the video because it is a little tricky to understand. However, I think that is essentially what I am looking for!
-emily