This seems like a very straightforward question, so apologies if it has been answered and I wasn’t able to find it in the existing forums!
In the Savings Budget Sheet, I would like to set the “actual” income value to be the previous month’s income rather than the current month’s. E.g., I would like the income from August to be the funds that are used to calculate my budgeting and expense amounts for September. Basically, I would already like an income balance to budget and spend from when a new month starts, rather than the $0 that is currently reflected (since I won’t get paid for September until the middle of the month).
The actual income in the Savings Budget sheet is based on transactions in your Transactions sheets, so I think the only way to do that would be to create a manual income transaction earlier in the month and then delete it when your actual paycheck comes in and shows up on your Transactions sheet.
Got it, that makes sense. Would love to know if anyone else has a similar desire and has found a good workaround! I’ll try manipulating the transactions and see if I can’t find a less clunky way to make it happen.
I think the only thing less clunky would be to ignore actual income. That is, I set my budgeted income to what I expect to be my monthly income, and then I compare my spending to budgeted income rather than actual income. Then, I just make sure everything is reconciled at the end of the month.
This seems like a mental thing for you. Everyone pretty much starts with 0 income for the month, and sometimes their first paycheck (our family experiences this) doesn’t come until the middle of the month. So it appears we are in a deficit until that paycheck arrives, and even until the 2nd biweekly paycheck arrives, sometimes at the end of the month. If you know for sure you’re getting paid, then you just can’t pay as much attention to that Actuals Income number until the end of the month.
If you can’t get past that though then here are two possible solutions to help you with this:
Solution A:
Do you get paid 1 time or 2 times a month? If you get paid once a month, you could split the transaction equally and change the second split part to be 2 weeks later than the paycheck date? If it’s 2 times a month (biweekly), you could split each one again and make one of the splits be for 1 week after you got paid? This way you’re not going to see such a lag in income showing up on the Savings Budget sheet.
Solution B:
Add about 5 columns to the right of the last visible column. For me, that’s after Column J (but it may be different for you as I have edited my Savings Budget sheet quite a bit).
Create a box that looks like this (style it however you want, name the heading whatever you want, just make sure you have the Income and Expenses and Net in one column, and the corresponding empty cell for each in the cell to the right of each).
Unhide the columns to the right. You are looking for a cell with “Actuals, Expense” in those first few unhidden columns.
In the box that you created at the beginning with the fields I showed in my screenshot, select the empty cell to the right of “Expense”, and type ‘=R22’, where R22 is the value in the unhidden area that shows the numerical value next to “Actuals, Expense”.
You can hide those columns again that were hidden.
Select the cell to the right of the “Income” cell that you created in the box at the beginning, and type ‘=E12’, where E12 equals the cell that shows the total income budget for the current month. This may be the same cell for you, or it may be slightly different. See screenshot.
Now, throughout the month, in that box, you will see the current Expenses Actuals subtracted from your Income Budget for the month. You can reference this to see how you are doing in terms of spending at any given day in relation to what you budgeted for the month. This should help you eliminate that issue you are having with feeling like you are in a deficit the first 2 weeks of the month.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any further clarification.
My wife and I were both self-employed for a while and never quite knew what our current month’s income would be, so we always budgeted for the upcoming month using the prior month’s income. For someone in a similar situation, I could imagine it being important!
I figured out a way to get the tiller sheet to do what I wanted. It’s probably eccentric and obnoxious. But if you’re interested I’ll see if I can remember how I did it…
Second — I realized that you were referring to a specific sheet (“Savings Budget Sheet”) that I don’t have or haven’t used. Maybe I started with a different template, or maybe It’s just been a while and they’ve changed things. Probably I should look at Tiller’s templates and figure out which sheet you’re referring to
But at any rate, here’s what I had done to achieve the goal of using prior month’s income for current month’s budget…
And a a piece of context: our income generally gets direct deposited into our savings account, but expenses come out of our checking — thus a need to know how much to transfer into checking each month.
beginning of month
Created a table that tallies the monthly total earned or spent for each category (from the “categories” and “transactions” sheets)
Referencing this data, created a table that pulls total of all gross income from previous month, then subtracts a few monthly categories (such as business expenses) to arrive at net income from previous month. This is the number we would reference to determine if we needed to cut some expenses or pull some money from savings during a tight month, or if we had extra to put back into savings.
Created a table that subtracted the current month’s budgeted expenses (also drawn from the “categories” sheet) from the prior month’s net income and arrived at a number for us to transfer from our primary savings account to our primary checking account. So that we always have enough in checking to cover the upcoming month’s budgeted expenses.
Then there is also a final piece involved in my process…
end of month
A table to tally how much we actually spent during the current month (as opposed to the budgeted amount). This gives me a second surplus/deficit to transfer between my primary checking and primary savings, and I include this number when I make the transfer at the beginning of the following month.
like I said… probably eccentric and it was definitely a bit tedious to build. But I’m happy to share screenshots, formulas, and/or a copy of the sheet, if it would actually be helpful for your intentions!
That is, I set my budgeted income to what I expect to be my monthly income, and then I compare my spending to budgeted income rather than actual income. Then, I just make sure everything is reconciled at the end of the month.
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