Tracking Budget

What is the Tracking Budget

The Tracking budget option allows the user to shift from the default Envelope budget option to a more traditional style of budgeting. The Tracking budget won't automatically rollover funds from month to month, and you don't have to account for all on budget funds continually. Instead of working with what funds you have now, you can forecast expenses and income. All transactions do still need to be categorized.

We, the Actual team, suggest that you try to use the Envelope Budget if you haven't already as we believe it to be a more capable style of budgeting than the Tracking Budget. However, if you would prefer the more traditional style, then the Tracking Budget is for you.

Enabling the Tracking Budget

The Tracking Budget feature can be enabled from the Settings page by clicking on "Switch to tracking budgeting".

Creating a Budget

Below is a view of what the budget page of a Tracking Budget looks like.

If you are creating a budget for the first time, here's how it works:

Assign the amount of income you expect to receive in the current month to the respective income categories.
Assign the amount of money you need for each of your spending categories.

Upon completion of these two tasks for the month, you will see the budgeted totals in the monthly header in gray. The expected savings you will incur for the month will show up in the Projected Savings field for the current or future month. When you receive new income or spend from your categories, enter those transactions in the account registers. Your budget is not static, so there will be times when you do not have enough budgeted for your spending. When one of your categories is overdrawn, increase the budgeted amount for that category so it is 0 or greater.

The Monthly Summary Explained

As you can see in the following example, your total budgeted items show in the right hand side of the summary for both your Income and Expenses and your actual expenses and income are totaled in the left hand side of the summary. The Projected Savings field is calculated from your budgeted income minus budgeted expenses, so expect the Projected Savings to decrease when covering overspending.

There are useful pie charts next to Income and Expenses to track your progress visually.

An incomplete green pie means your total expenses or income are less than your total amount budgeted for expenses or income, respectively.

A complete green pie chart means your spending and budget are exactly the same.

A pie chart that has turned red means you have overspent your total budget.

When a new month begins, your Projected Savings changes to Saved or Overspent, depending on your final transactions. The final savings amount calculated for this field is your actual income minus your actual expenses. If you hover your mouse over the Saved or Overspent text, you can view the breakdown of projected and actual savings for the month.

How Money Rolls Over

Money does not automatically carry over from month to month in the Tracking Budget. If you have overspending in any category, you may wish to carry this balance forward into the next month. This can be done by clicking on the Balance of the category and select Rollover Overspending.

:::note If you utilize the Rollover Overspending feature on a category that is not over spent, the entire spent amount will be forwarded to the next month and the Saved amount will increase for the current month. This will affect your spent totals as if the spending didn't happen. The spending will only show up in the month that the rollover stops. :::

Working With the Budget

All the non-budgeting features of Actual can be used with the Tracking Budget the same as the Envelope Budget. Experimental features may not work with the Tracking Budget yet. If not please let us know in the feature feedback. :::note If you find critical functionality missing that you need, please submit a request on GitHub. :::