Docs: Envelope Budget

@keenan.burkepitts :wink: I’m glad you see why we took this one off the menu for most folks.

You’re seeing the total rollover savings because Feb’s budget doesn’t know where it should roll to so it just moves all of it to the “rollover adjustment.” By default you get two budget months/periods in that template when you first start using it. The current month/period and the prior month/period. The default doesn’t set a “Rollover To” category for the prior month so in your Budgets History sheet this line is blank (no categories listed) in Feb. The ones you assigned on the Categories sheet only applied to March - March’s line is not blank in Budgets History. So you can either retroactively set the Rollover To for Feb or clear the rollover adjustment using the steps in the “Configuring the budget to use rollovers” subsection above under "Setting Up a Budget for Zero Sum or Envelope Budgeting"

I highly recommend anyone confused about why rollovers aren’t showing in one month that you’d expect to watch this video:

:wave:, @mcfarlanemeg!

I think this is also probably the same thing you’re experiencing. Please see above explanation/watch video and let me know if that doesn’t explain why your March rollover isn’t showing as $240 for that category.

This is exactly it! Thank you!

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I am trying to open a rollover sheet (following the instructions I found) and it keeps giving me a spreadsheet not compatible error. I opened a new template, selected add-on, tiller, budget and start… and nothing.

@jahaverland, make sure you are starting in a blank Google Sheet (not the Foundation Template from the Tiller Console and run the Tiller add-on > Budget > Start in that one.

Is it necessary to categorize both the savings and the checking transactions in order to balance savings goals out to zero? My initial assumption was that I would just categorize the transaction taking money out accordingly to the savings goal transaction and I would categorize the deposit of that money into another account as a transfer transaction. This allows my budget to show that I actually did spend the budgeted amount for the saving goals each month. If I categorize both ends of the transfer, won’t it just cancel it out and not look like I spent any money towards that savings goal in my budget?

One of my savings goals transfers money into ally bank from my checking account at a credit union. Because ally bank’s feed integration with Tiller still appears to be broken, what is a recommended workaround if I do need to account for the savings deposit transaction side in order to balance it out to $0.

Thanks Heather – that helped clarify my confusion.

I think I can just categorize the transactions that are one-sided (credit union withdrawals without the deposit into ally bank) as “transfer” and it will still work fine. The actual will look like $0 each month and the budgeted amount will rollover to the next month.

If this method won’t work and I’m missing something please let me know. Thanks!

@keenan.burkepitts, the reason you want the savings goal category to net to $0 - and use that for the inflow and outflow - is because you want the budgeted amount to rollover in order to reflect the savings NOT the actual “transfer” of the savings goal money.

Let me know if that helps.

I use zero-base budgeting and rollovers.
I am curious the process to “Adjust” from a rollover in one category to the budget of another category. When I do this, it creates the ‘error’ that my budgeted amount is more than my income, which I read was not good for the rollover balances. Is there a way to move/adjust/transfer the money from the rollover of one category to the budget of another without causing problems?

@matthew.fuller526 As long as you’re creating 2 balanced adjustments, you shouldn’t have any error. Say you’re moving $50 of rollover from your groceries category to your to your eating out category, you would need to “r-50” on the first and then “r+50” on the other. They’ll balance out to 0 and won’t mess up your budgeted amount.

You can also use an option on the add-on to do this in one step: Add-ons > Tiller > Budget > Adjust Category. You can do either budget or rollover. I always use rollover if it’s there so I don’t have to muck with the budget again next month, since my amounts are almost always the same.

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I am using the Monthly Budget App. This seems to be happening every other month or so. But when I go into a new period, I have issues. For instance, all of March was categorized and completed. Now that we are in April, I have the option to select April, but then the Period will not let me switch to 4/1/2020 and it stays stuck on March’s data.

Hi @david.myones,

This is a common issue with the envelope budget template in that the script that automatically creates the new month fails and you need to manually trigger it. You can get the April month to switch by open the add-ons menu > Tiller > Budget > Analyze Budgets History.

Let me know if that doesn’t help.
Heather

It did, thanks Heather! I looked back up what you told me the last time. It fixed it. Thanks again!

David

@aronos @heather Thanks for the reply and like. I understand that adjustment, I have used it that way and it works well if we want to move the money from rollover to rollover or budget to budget, but it doesn’t work converting rollover to budget. If I have rollover from last month’s Personal Spending category, but I need that for this month’s Groceries budget, I would like to be able to adjust to those accordingly. If I do, the spreadsheet will give the errors mentioned. So my question remains, is there a way to move money from a rollover in one category to the budget of another without causing errors? Do the errors matter, i.e. will it cause issues later? Maybe the error(s) can be ignored, I am not sure. It seems to me that there shouldn’t be any problem transferring money between categories, rollover, budget, or available, as long as the money is there to be transferred. The money is still all there, I am not going ‘over’ what is available. I really would like to be able to transfer from the available in one category to the available of another. Maybe that has to be done rollover to rollover and I have to live with the transfer that way.

Hi @matthew.fuller526,

The errors do matter. You want to have a balanced budget (big green check mark) to avoid “rollover adjustments” creeping into next month’s budget. The reason you get those errors is that you’re trying to move money from rollover to budget so the total expense budget increases but the total income doesn’t increase to cover that increase in expense budget. The workflow to avoid those errors would be to move money from the rollover of personal spending to the rollover of the groceries category. The rollover for groceries supplements the “available” amount for that category so you don’t really need to add it to the budget for that category as it’s available when it’s moved to the rollover, that is the whole point of rollovers :wink: hopefully that helps.

Heather

I am trying to change the “rollover to” category for this month’s budget, but it is not saving it. For example, if I want to rollover “restaurant” to “groceries” for next month, I change it, but it reverts back to “restaurant.” What am I doing incorrectly?

@mcfarlanemeg, are you changing it on the Categories sheet or Budgets History? If you’re changing it in Categories it should be setting that Rollover To for how money will rollover from this month to next month. Does that help?

Thanks, Heather. I’m trying to do it in the Budgets History because I temporarily want to roll over certain categories to different ones. It’s not saving my changes, though. What am I doing incorrectly?

I manually am adjusting categories in my Budgets History tab, because I’m wanting to temporarily rollover money from categories to different ones than they normally are assigned. However, every time I manually change the category, such as from “Childcare” to “Gear and Clothing” for example, it changes back to “childcare” after I Analyze Budget History. I’ve attached a screen shot to show how I have been able to do this in the past, but it is not letting me do it anymore for some reason. In the screen shot, I have changed column K at least 10 times to be “Gear & Clothing,” yet it keeps reverting back to Childcare.

I started a new foundation workbook, deleted the conflicting sheets, brought in the Tiller Budget sheets, setup my categories, copied my transactions from old foundation workbook into new transaction sheet. I had changed a few categories so I reviewed and edited the affected transactions. Used budgets history sheet to get me back to the beginning of the year. Manipulated my rollovers, monthly budget amounts etc. to get myself current. I came over from mVelopes with rollovers. It wasn’t too painful and the exercise thought me a lot about this system. The help pages and YouTube videos were sufficient to grasp what I wanted to accomplish.

I’ve been a user of mVelopes and the crown ministries product before finicity acquired it for many, many years. Zero based budgeting has been a way of life for my family for so long that I was thrilled to find this alternative. Using rollover amounts is the best way to have money available in virtual accounts for known expenses like annual insurance policies, property tax etc and to be ready for cash vehicle purchases or repairs. We are well beyond the debt snowball phase but continue to find this system the best way to look at our finances.

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