Checking the account balance against savings expenses to know available cash?

What is the best way to check an account for available cash? The Savings Budget shows all the roll-over in the ‘savings’ column for expense categories, for future expenses. Should I just compare this total of expense savings with my account balance? The Savings & Debt sheet attempts this for savings goals, with the nifty “Savings Account Check”, but not for all expense savings, such as when I’ve merely budgeted monthly for a quarterly or yearly expense. Thanks!

I think that is the recommended workflow, yes, @paulnugent22. It’s always been a bit of a riddle of how we might build this in type of “check” in automatically because of the various accounts you may have connected to the transactions sheet. Which ones is the primary savings one? What if there are multiple and you’re doing transfers. I think just checking against your account balance(s) on the Balances sheet is the easiest.

@randy do you have other ideas?

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I think you’re on the right track, @paulnugent22. My understanding is that you are looking to compare bank balances (i.e. immediate, real-world cash on hand) to virtual savings (i.e. Savings-Budget, in-category accruals) and see what is available in the former beyond what is committed to the latter.

From the tooling we have at this point, you are correct that the Savings & Debt sheet is your best bet. If you ignore the rationale that it is for long-term savings and just include all expense accounts, you can assign real-world bank accounts to where each category accrues, and then use the query tool to determine what your available cash balance is for each account.

Though the template is intended as a long-term savings tool, I don’t think it would be very different architecturally if it were purpose-built for your task. Or maybe I’m wrong… what would be different about a template built to this need?

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Yes, that works just fine to include all expense categories in the Savings & Debt. No different architecture needed, only different labeling, so that the “Savings Account Check” is not all about “goals”. Maybe added lines for non-goal accruals, and current month expenses, or a renaming from “Allocated to Goals” to “Allocated to Goals, Accruals, and current month expenses”.

When using the query tool to fully determine available cash balance, I need to assign multiple real-world bank accounts, such as a savings and a checking.