Budgets and forecasting

Your budgets

So far you've looked back at what came in and what went out. This lesson looks ahead, in three steps: deciding what you want to spend, noting what you know is coming, and checking where your balances are heading.

How a budget works

A budget sets how much you intend to spend in a category over a period, and abacova tracks your actual spending against it. A household budget might have one line for groceries, one for dining out and one for transport.

The budgets screen shows planned against actual, so you can tell how each one is going without adding anything up. A budget doesn't stop a payment, because abacova records your money and never moves it. Its job is to show you the gap early. If you'd rather be told than go and look, alerts can warn you when you overspend.

Create a budget

Create a budget for a category and a period, for example your household utilities over a month. Set an amount you can realistically keep to: what you spend in a typical month is a better starting point than a wish. Amounts accept a comma or a dot as the decimal mark.

Budgets are not part of the free or entry plans. Where they are available, the mid plan allows ten. You can also check your budgets in the phone app.

What's coming

Some expenses you know about well before they arrive: the rent on the first, a subscription each month, your salary. Note them in advance as planned transactions. abacova doesn't detect recurring charges by itself, so you set each one up by hand.

Schedule a monthly payment

Create a new planned transaction and choose the account. Choose Expense or Income above the amount, then type the amount without a sign. A transfer plan between your own accounts has no such choice.

Then decide how it should behave when the date arrives. It can post by itself, or it can wait for you to confirm it. Posting by itself suits fixed amounts, while waiting suits bills that change a little each time.

Upcoming items appear on the transactions page, so you can see them next to what has already happened. Planned transactions have no phone screen of their own: the app opens them in the browser.

Change a schedule

Editing the start date moves the whole schedule forward or back. It doesn't skip the next occurrence. A plan set to the last day of the month can be switched to a fixed day number, and back again.

The forecast

With your planned transactions in place, abacova can look ahead for you.

Where your balances are heading

The cash-flow forecast is a projection: it takes your current balances and adds your active planned transactions. It warns you when an account would go negative, except for loans and personal debts, so you can act before it happens.

A forecast only knows what you've told it, which is why it gets more useful with every plan you add. If it shows a tight moment, you still have time to move money yourself or put off an expense.