Rollover Balance handling on new Monthly Budget Period

I am new to Tiller and have successfully setup and used the Monthly Budget Tracker in Google Sheets. I have a question on how the Rollover Balances are handled. I created a future Budget entry in Budget History for May and the Total Rollover Savings value for the May budget does not match what I expected. If I sum all the Available for my current April Budget, I expected this amount would match the Total Rollover Savings for May. Instead of matching, the May value is about 1/3 the amount. Do I have an incorrect understanding of how Rollover balances are designed?

:wave:, @daryl2020!

Could it be that you’re expecting that March’s rollover would be impacting the May budget but it’s not?

I’d recommend reviewing this reply and the video linked here:

@daryl2020 The First thing I always do when stuff doesn’t seem to line up from one budget to another is run the history analyzer… from the Add-Ons menu Tiller > Budget > Analyze Budgets History. If you’ve made changes to April after creating May, they won’t be reflected until the analyzer runs again. Also, make sure that you’ve set the “Rollover To” column on all of your expense and income categories in the Categories sheet. If I recall correctly, I had to manually set a few of those in my Budgets History sheet on my first month’s budget because I didn’t set them in the sheet early enough.

I followed the tips and it looks like the category level rollover is working. On the May budget I have the following statement which I do not understand what it means. I have search the help but cannot find a good solution:

For budget accuracy, redistribute $3,429 of unfavorable Rollover Adjustment.

@daryl2020 That means that one or more of your previous budgets wasn’t zero-summed. One goal on this particular sheet is to have every dollar of income budgeted into a category. It doesn’t necessarily have to be spent, just budgeted.

I imagine that you probably already had your budget and categories before starting and some money in many of them. For your first month’s (in Tiller) budget, you can set those “starting funds” by setting up rollover to the appropriate amount for each of them. That way any actual spending from the month that exceeds what you set aside that month doesn’t look like you overspent your budget.

That may or may not be the problem, but at any rate, make sure your previous budgets are balanced. And of be sure to run the Analyze Budgets History again after making adjustments.