How to create an expense budget

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Track every penny of your expenses by setting up an expense budget. In this guide, we'll walk you through all the ins and outs of how to set up an expense budget.

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1. A quick summary

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Expense budgets are to be created for any regular expenses, like your groceries for example. Once you set up an expense budget, you can use the category for the budget for categorising merchants & transactions. Categorising expense transactions allows you to then track your actual spend vs what you've budgeted, along with bringing a lot of the other features and widgets to life throughout the app.

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2. Adding an expense budget

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To add an expense budget, you can do this from the budget summary screen. Just to the right of 'Expense budgets' you'll see a + symbol; simply tap on that to start to create an expense budget.

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3. Enter details

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Once you've selected to add an expense budget, enter in your details under 'Enter details'. Start with selected a category to use for the budget, or you can create your own here too.

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• Category: Tap on where it says 'Select or create a category', you'll then see a list of categories available to choose from. This list is broken down by default categories and categories you've already created when categorising merchants or transactions. You can also tap on the green 'Create category' button to create a new one.
• Amount: Enter in the amount of your expense.
• How often: Select how often this expense amount occurs; this can be weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, annually or even a custom period. Once you select it, a pop-up window will show the different options.‍
• Need or want?: Enter in if this expense is a need or a want.‍
• Spread across periods: Select if you'd like to spread this budget across the other budget periods as well. Or select 'No' to only show the budget in the view select as 'How often'.

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4. 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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5. Personalise

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Once you've entered your details, you can personalise your budget by adding a colour and emoji. Simply tap on the colour button to show the colour selector. Once you've selected a colour, you can add an emoji by tapping the grey input field.

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6. Save & Finish or Next expense

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Now that you've entered all your details and personalised your expense budget, you can choose to save and finish, or if you have another expense budget to add, you can select the next expense. Save & finish will bring you back to the budget summary screen, while next expense will save your budget and then allow you to add another.

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7. Adding details to cashflow

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Once you add an expense budget, this will appear in your cash flow as a monthly expense. When you edit your expense budget amounts and frequency, this will update the amount in your cash flow, or you can edit your cash flow directly as well without effecting your budget details. 

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You're all ready to go 🎉

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Woohoo! You've just set up an expense budget. If you run into any issues while setting everything up, feel free to get in touch with us at hello@budgetbuddie.co.nz.