Project & plan checking balances over the year?

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@soitmake: Yeah, there is definitely more than one way to tackle this problem. It seems like you’re going to modify the Categories sheet in a similar way to my Recurring Expenses sheet to hold which card/account will pay which expense. I initially had the same idea to use Categories directly, but there were two problems with that route for me:

  1. Categories is at a monthly time grain. You cannot tell what part of the budget balance is due at any given part of the month. I just know that I have $x amount expected for a category this entire month.
    – This makes plotting them against any timeframe that is not month-to-month difficult.

  2. Categories is (of course) at a category level grain. I may have one category, like Utilities, that covers multiple expenses like Water, Gas/Electricity, etc… I might pay Water with account A, and Gas/Electricity with Account B.

It seems like problem 1 above is also a problem for you. I’m not sure how to tackle it with your solution, though. When thinking over this problem for myself, I came to the conclusion that tying my projected budget to Categories kind of locks me into that ambiguous monthly amount, which I did not want. That’s when I started building out my Recurring Expenses sheet. After developing this sheet, I found something kind of similar that you should look into called Budget Plan by @jpfieber. Honestly, If I were building your solution: I would install this template, then add a column to it instead of categories to show which card covers what expense. That would give you a lot more flexibility with things.

Changing your credit card due date to better align everything in order to solve problem #1 is possible. But I believe there is a limit to how many times you can request that per card, it would be impractical, and a pain.

I also have need for the same report you’re talking about to track current checking balances and project the expected balance over the year based on my budgeted amounts/incomes. I’ve been planning on building out this report using my base solution sometime soon. When I complete it, I’ll give you a link in case you can use it, or just to skim over for ideas.

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