Step three: Creating budgets
Once your transactions are loaded into PocketSmith and categorised, you can start creating Budgets for each category.
We recommend creating Budgets for recurring bills or regular income payments on the date the transaction is likely to occur as this will result in more accurate forecasting and reporting.
For expenses that do not occur on a specific date, we recommend selecting weekly, fortnightly, or monthly options depending on how you'd like to structure your budget. Remember you can revisit and change these as needed!
Learn how to create Budgets here: Creating a new budget and see our Tips and tricks budget guide.
Tip
Budgets are also used to create forecast balances for a user's accounts (more on this later). Because of this, when creating a budget you'll be asked to assign it to an account.
Under 'Which account's forecast is this budget for?' select the account the transaction is most likely to occur in.
Any transactions assigned to the category, regardless of the account they came from, will still be counted towards the budget, this is purely for forecasting purposes.
Understanding the Budget page
The overall budget summary displayed at the top of the Budget page (Budget) reflects a user's actual earning and spending compared to their budgeted earning and spending for the date range selected.
- If the budget summary date range has not been applied to the page, the budgets for individual categories will reflect the current budget period per category.
- If the budget summary date range has been applied to the page, the budgets will be distributed across the applied date range.
For more information, see: Using the Budget page
Where to next
For the full overview of getting started with PocketSmith and the next stages, please see: Getting started with PocketSmith.