The way this is most useful to me is to flag an error. If I have a non-zero adjustment, then I effed something up.
Probably! I think situations #1 and #2 should be treated as data errors in the budget. If you have uncategorized transactions and your transfers don’t equal zero, there should be warnings to correct them and that should be the end of it. It’s reasonable to expect people to keep their data clean. I could be wrong but I also feel like people that would be typically drawn to a solution like Tiller are more apt to do so.
I think #4 should also be considered an error, but I probably don’t have a full understanding of the ways different people handle their flow and there may be legitimate reasons why they aren’t balanced. But that being said, (I think) this is a zero-based budgeting system so intuitively income and expenses should come out to zero.
Something like “unbudgeted (or allocated) funds” or “overbudgeted (or allocated) funds.” The second one is clumsy but that’s the track my mind is on, largely based on simplifying to only really considering situation #3. Something to say “Hey, you budgeted this dough last month but didn’t spend it.”
Maybe I’m missing something obvious but shouldn’t it be as simple as Budget - Actual = Savings (or rollover)? (Again, with the above assumptions)
I used to do something like this in a group called “Buffer” that had two categories in it. Over time I tried a 3 ways of adjusting funds in and out of the buffer to other categories: 1) +/- Savings (not always available, low trackability - would be better with the Budget Journal) 2) +/- Budget (low trackability, makes setting up next month’s budget more difficult) 3) Manual transactions (transfers) that moved from one to the other (great trackability, pita to do)
Eventually, I transitioned to moving this “buffer” to my income rollover. I talked about that some in Envelope Budget (add-on): setup best practices/basics? - #2 by isabelanne1021
Instinct says yes, but the “truing up” issue you mention is an interesting point. For me personally, when I found I needed to do that I went back to the beginning and fixed it there. It seems to me that fixing the error where it occurred should be a best practice and would avoid problems with this. That $1000 in your Travel category came from somewhere… it was either there at the start of your Tiller history or there’s a matching transaction (be it income, transfer, whatever). In either event, the proper way to account for it should be at the source of the error.
No, but maybe a warning indicating that the current adjustments aren’t balanced would be useful. Either on the dashboard and/or when the update function is initiated. I’m wavering on this. On the one hand if the calculation is complex and represents a lot of different things, having it instantly update on unwritten adjustments may cause excess confusion. But having some sort of easy, live-updating calculation of your income/expense balance is useful.