Firstly, when using the sidebar and you want to learn more about the template, it goes to the Savings and Debt page, not the Savings Budget.
Secondly, when you update the budget, because by default the next month’s budget is looking at prior months it will overwrite the whole rest of the year with the new amount, not just the current month, as the video and docs mention.
Thanks for catching the documentation issue, @yossiea. I think I fixed that but I think due to caching I can’t prove it to myself… but it may work for others now or everyone soon.
The cascading formulas in the Categories are just a shortcut to help start your budgeting process. I agree that the formulas may not be compatible with how some people use the Savings Budget. You can just select all of the cells with the formulas in your Categories sheet and paste over “as values” if you’d prefer to have the budgets work independently.
Thanks, I’m giving the budget a shot, but I haven’t used it in two years of data and I have savings of -10k in some areas so not sure if that’s expected due to transactions or not.
If you want to start fresh, you can either make savings adjustments to set starting balances or you can change your accrual-start date (the latter is documented here).
Thanks, I already started to zero out the savings, so I’ll just go that way. If I set it now to 2022, it makes it even worse since the savings were changed.
I did have a question though. I received some money in my Misc Income category that I wasn’t expecting. So the budget is around $50 but the actual is much more.
I’d like to apply that to an area that can use the money. But if I minus out the amount, then the Misc Income savings column goes negative, and if I change it in the budget, then the budget goes negative. Do I just need to wait for next month when it will be in the savings and then just change it then?
Dining Out -$39.86 $100.00 $37.20 $22.94
For example, in this situation, what is the best practice to clear out these amounts?