&Colin.Wright; &Colin.Wright.mail;
&Jack.H.Ostroff; &Jack.H.Ostroff.mail;
2011-06-29
4.6

# Budgets

## What is a budget?

A budget is a categorized list of expected income and expenses for a period.

The Budget facility of &kmymoney; allows you to create annual budgets. More than one Budget can be created for any year. You set monthly Budget values against any Income or Expense categories that you have defined. The values can be set in three ways, depending on the Period:

Monthly

  (Default) specify a single value applied to every month in the Budget

Yearly

  specify a single value to divide evenly across each month in the Budget

Individual

  specify separate values for each month.

  This is used for income and expenses spread irregularly through the year.

&kmymoney; provides a number of reports which compare actual income and expenses against the entered Budgets. These are described in more detail in another section.

## Your budgets

You can access your budgets by clicking the appropriate icon in the navigation pane at the left hand side of your &kmymoney; window.

There are two major sections to the budget window. These are described in more detail below. On the left, the main section displays the list of budgets you have created. Above that are buttons for creating, renaming, and deleting budgets. On the right, there are three sections. At the top is the Accounts List. At the bottom is a display of the amounts assigned to the budget for the category selected in the Accounts List above. Between those two areas are some additional controls for managing the budget.

### Viewing, creating, renaming, and deleting budgets

This section of the Budgets window displays the list of Budgets contained in the current &kmymoney; file. If no Budget has yet been created the list will be empty. The list of Budgets has two columns:

Name

  Name of the Budget

Year

  Fiscal year of the Budget. Note that the starting month and day of the fiscal year can be specified in the Configure &kmymoney; dialog.

Values from the selected Budget are displayed to the right. To select a different Budget you can click on the Budget in the list. Alternatively, when the list has focus, you can select a different Budget using the up and down keys. If you have made changes to a Budget and then select a different budget &kmymoney; will ask you whether you want to save or discard the changes.

There are three buttons above the list of Budgets.

New

  Create a new, empty budget. The default name of a new budget is "Budget <year>" where <year> is the current fiscal year.

Rename

  Edit the name of the selected Budget.

  You can also edit the name of a Budget by double-clicking on the name of a Budget in the list.

Delete

  Delete the selected Budget

Additional options are available on a menu accessed by right-clicking on a Budget.

New Budget

  Create a new, empty Budget.

Rename Budget

  Rename the selected Budget.

Change budget year

  Displays a window with a list of years to select a different fiscal year for the budget.

Delete budget

  Delete the selected Budget.

Copy budget

  Creates a copy of the selected Budget. The new Budget has the name "Copy of <budget>", where <budget> is the name of the copied Budget.

Budget based on forecast

  Fills in budget amounts based on data from &kmymoney;'s Forecast values. See the section on Forecasts for more information.

### Account List

The Accounts List displays the list of Income and Expense Categories. (Remember, within &kmymoney;, categories are treated as a special type of account.) As in other places in &kmymoney;, the list is organized in a tree structure. The list can be expanded or collapsed to show or hide Subcategories within a Category. The Accounts List has a number of columns:

Account

  Account (Category) name

Type

  Category Type (Income or Expense)

Total Balance

  Current balance of Account. This will be blank for Categories, unless the Category is defined in a foreign currency. In this case, Total Balance will show the value for the Category in its defined currency.

Total Value

  Total yearly value in the Budget. If a Category has Subcategories and the Category's list of Subcategories is collapsed the value displayed is the sum of the values for the Category and all of its Subcategories. If a Category is defined in a foreign currency, the Total Value will show the value in the base currency.

Below the Accounts List are several controls. The Update and Revert buttons are described further below. The collapse and expand buttons collapse or expand the entire Accounts List.

The Accounts List can be filtered in two ways. Checking the "Hide unused categories" checkbox hides any Categories for which no value has been assigned to the Category or any of its Subcategories. To the right of this, is an unlabelled text box. Only categories which include whatever is typed in this box are listed, but their parent categories are also listed.

Note that changing either the "Hide unused budget categories" or the filter value is likely to change the list of Categories display. You may need to re-expand the list to see all the Categories that should be displayed with the current settings.

### Assignments

The Assignments area shows the values for the Category selected in the Accounts List.

Account

  Displays the name of the selected Category. If the Category is a Subcategory, its full name is displayed in the Category:Subcategory format.

Total

  Displays the total yearly value assigned to the Category

Include subaccounts

  If this is checked, then Reports show actual income or expenses in Subcategories belonging to the Category against the Category instead of the Subcategory.

  If a Subcategory has a value defined in the Budget, then the income and expenses are shown against the Subcategory.

  If the Category selected in the Accounts List has its Subcategories collapsed, although its Total Value will show the sum of the Total Values for all its Subcategories, the amounts in the Assignments area may still show 0, unless this box has been checked or an amount has explicitly been assigned to the Category.

  In general, for you will either check this box and assign values to the Category and not to any of its Subcategories, or not check the box, and assign values to the Subcategories but not the Category. If any Subcategories have assigned amounts when this box is checked, then those amounts are rolled up to the Category.

Clear

  The Clear button resets the budgeted category value or values to zero.

Period

  The Period radio buttons allow you to select the period for which the value applies

  Monthly

    A single value is entered, specifying the amount per month. This is the default setting.

  Yearly

    A single value is entered, specifying the amount per year.

  Individual

    Values are specified for each Calendar month. This is used where expense or income is spread irregularly through the year.

  If a value is or values are already specified and the Period is changed &kmymoney; will ask whether to use the current total yearly value to assign the new values.

### Update and Revert

For performance reasons, changes made to a Budget are not saved immediately. Instead, they must first be stored using the Update button and then permanently saved using the &kmymoney; Save.

When a Budget's values are first modified, the Update and Revert buttons are enabled. Multiple changes can be made to the Budget. Pressing Update will store the changes and disable the Update and Revert buttons.

The &kmymoney; Save only saves changes that have been stored using the Update button. Thus, if you have modified a Budget but not yet stored the changes &kmymoney; Save will not affect the modified Budget and the Update and Revert buttons remain enabled.

Revert undoes any changes made to a Budget since the last Update and disables the Update and Revert buttons.

Changes stored using Update but not yet saved using &kmymoney; Save can only be reverted by reloading the &kmymoney; file.

## Budget Reports

&kmymoney; provides a number of reports to compare actual income and expenses against a Budget. These are listed in Reports under "Budgeting". There are two types of Budget Reports:

Budget only

  These reports display values from a Budget.

  Monthly Budget

    Displays the monthly values from a Budget.

  Yearly Budget

    Displays the monthly values from a Budget, with yearly total.

Budget vs. Actual

  These reports compare values from a Budget to actual income and expenses. In each budget report you can find the columns Budget, Actual, and Difference. Each report differs in the period that is shown.

  Budget vs. Actual This Year

    From the beginning of the year until today

  Budget vs. Actual This Year (YTM)

    From the beginning of the year until the last day of the previous month

  Monthly Budgeted vs. Actual

    From the beginning of the year until the last day of the current month

  Yearly Budgeted vs. Actual

    From January 1st until December 31st

  Yearly Budgeted vs. Actual (Graph)

    Same as the previous report but it shows the graph by default

  These reports provide a base from which custom reports can be created by changing the date range and Budget, among other options.