Budget feature overview

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Getting your budget set up unlocks almost every other feature within BudgetBuddie. Here in this guide, we'll give you an overview of how the budget works.

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1. A quick summary

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Your budget unlocks almost every other feature or function within BudgetBuddie and lays the foundation for understanding where your money is going and how to be better with it. Your budget isn't only restricted to expenses, it also allows you to create income budgets as well. At the bottom of the budget screen, you'll see your budget breakdown, where you can toggle between what you've budgeted and what your actual income and spending have been. You can also set up one-off budgets here to track your spending on one-off things like a holiday.

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2. Creating an income budget

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To add an income budget, simply select the + symbol just to the right of 'Income budgets'. You'll then see a screen where you can select or create a category and then enter in your details, like amount, and how often, spread across periods, and you can also personalise it to your preference with colours and emojis. 

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3. Creating expense budgets

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To add an expense budget, you can do this by selecting the + symbol just to the right of 'Expense budgets'. You'll then see a screen where you can enter in your details, start by selecting 'Select or create a category'. Then you can enter in your amount, how often, if its a want or need, if you'd like to spread it across periods and you can also personalise it to your preference with colours and emojis. 

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4. Spread across periods

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When creating or editing a budget, you can choose whether or not to spread the budget amount across the periods. If you select 'Yes', then the budgeted amount you've entered gets evenly spread across each period. If you select 'No', then the budget will only appear in the How often option you've selected. Here's some examples below:

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• Spread across periods 'No': If you choose 'Weekly' for 'How often?', you're setting a weekly budget. Selecting 'No' for 'Spread across periods' means the $350 Food & Drink budget will only appear in the 'This week' or 'Last week' views in the budget summary.
• Spread across periods 'Yes': If you choose 'Weekly' and select 'Yes' for 'Spread across periods', the $350 budget will appear in weekly views and be spread across other periods. For example, in the 'This year' view, the weekly budget is multiplied by 52 to show an annual amount.

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5. Auto expense

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If you're using a default category to create your budget, you can choose to select auto expense, which will automatically enter your monthly budgeted amount based on an average of the last 3 months. You can then change this to fortnightly or weekly and make adjustments from there.

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6. Budget breakdown

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Once you've created all your income and expense budgets, you can then view your budget breakdown to see what your total income and expenses are, along with whether you'll have money left over. You can toggle between showing your budgeted amounts and actual income and spending by tapping the green button. Your actual breakdown shows your income or spending based on your transaction data. 

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7. One off budgets

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Setting up a one-off budget is super simple; start by tapping the + symbol to get started. Once you've tapped the + symbol, you can enter in all your details, like your name and amount. You can also personalise this with a colour and emoji. 

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8. Toggle between views

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Once you've set up your budgets, you can view how you're tracking for this week, fortnight, month, quarter, this year along any custom budgets you've created.

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We calculate your weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, annual and custom amounts to the day.

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9. Your budgets and categorising transactions

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When you create budgets, you can categorise your merchants and transactions to the category used for the budget. When you categorise your transactions, the amounts get added to your budget so you can track your progress. These categories also get factored into almost every widget on the dashboard and throughout other features within the app.

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You're all ready to go 🎉

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Now that you understand how to get the most our of the budget feature, you can explore your finances further in each feature we have to offer. If you run into any issues while setting everything up, feel free to get in touch with us at hello@budgetbuddie.co.nz.