Savings Budget - checking that it tracks real-world savings

[matta]

@warren

@matta. You can reference the Balance History Sheet for previous months balances for your various accounts. This sheet is sometimes hidden… depending on the template you are using. More about this sheet on the link below.

https://help.tillerhq.com/en/articles/821562-understanding-the-balance-history-sheet

Regarding your question about the Savings Budget… perhaps @randy can chime in.

Thanks @warren.

I wanted something more user friendly than the Balance History sheet. I did do some more reading in the forum here and realized that the Balance History data may not be the right thing to use anyway. Apparently the Balance History data and the Transaction sheets are not really expected to match exactly, date for date, since the former reflects cleared transactions only, whereas the Transactions sheet may show transactions that aren’t yet cleared. If the budgeting sheets work off the Transactions sheet only, reconciling them to the Balance History sheet is a fool’s errand, though it may be usable as a sanity check.

I think Docs: Envelope Budget (the discussion on rollover adjustments) summarizes the kinds of issues I am hoping to catch. I basically don’t want silly data entry errors to persist forever. I make a lot of them, and catching all of them is what computers are for.

I did get up and running with the Savings Budget sheet, with two issues:

1. I accidentally marked a Transaction category as Track->Savings in the Categories sheet, and there was a transaction that spanned a month boundary. This caused the Savings total shown in the black Expense row in the Savings Budget sheet to not match the sum of individual Savings amounts displayed on the same sheet, permanently, across all subsequent months, since this happened across December->January and I began the budget in Jan.
2. I attempted to allocate my total net worth (in cash flow accounts) to category savings amounts as of Jan 1 2020 account balances in the Jan 2020 Savings Budget sheet. I’m not confident I have this set correctly, nor am I sure how to determine it stays that way over time.

Perhaps obvious, but I’m trying to do zero-based envelope budgeting here.

All that said, the Savings Budget is much better for my spending patterns than the Monthly/Yearly Budget sheets, since I do a lot of savings across months and my spending is irregular.

Happy to hear if @randy has something to say about this. I watched the recent webinar and it wasn’t quite clear if my concerns were known or on the radar.