The default is to count the portions you pay in advance in the year you pay them, just wondering if folks had an alternate system taking into account the year the trip takes place?
Context: I’m less interested in cashflow management than overall ‘spend per year’ paying portions of a trip that takes place in March in December, it might be nice to credit that against the new year rather than the current one…
Thinking out loud here…it makes it looks optically like spending far more than I intend to in the year
I think you answered it yourself. If you are less interested In Cash flow, then you may want to change the date of the transaction to the month/year of the vacation.
Granted, this may make things interesting if you need a view of cashflow later.
as an alternative, you could create a category called Vacation pre-paid as type Transfer and add those transactions there.
If it were me, I’d do as @richl suggests, create a dedicated category. Whether or not the category is a Transfer or Expense category depends on how you want that money to show up in reports. I would set it to Expense. Then using tools like Savings Budget or Budget Status you could transfer/deposit funds into that category so they are waiting to be spent. When you eventually spend it, of course categorize those transactions to that category.