I don’t really use Emma for budgeting - more to analyse expenditure which has already happened. In that case I now have a large expense this month which I would like to split into 12 over the whole calendar year. Emma works well if you are looking at monthly regular payments but not for annual payments. So if you choose to pay your TV license annually it will throw out that one month but if you choose to pay monthly it is fine.
I think this could be solved by creating a setting to set some budget categories to a yearly mode where all spending is put against the total you’ve allocated. Each month can then just show how much you’ve spent towards that item accumulated since the start of the year?
That way yearly expenses like a TV Licence work even if paid for in one go and more irregular spending in budgets (E.g I’ve allocated £1000 to holidays this year or renovations which may be spent in two separate months) are clearly visible as and when you pay for anything. I’ve come across this booking a holiday where I’m paying upfront for some items now and will have another burst of expenses when I actually go later in the year.
This would definitely make budgeting more powerful for me as it only shows if I spend more than planned on groceries at the moment.
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My point is that its fairly easy to make a minor tweak to how you manage your money to make a monthly spending analytics tool work well for you even with annual expenses - i.e. just put 1/12th of the annually paid expenses aside in a savings account and track that “spend” instead of tracking the single annual payment.
I do agree it would be helpful for Dozens to provide an annual view of expenditure (i.e. what I think is being asked for in the opening post). But I just can’t see how what you asked for would work in practice:
I can only see it being confusing if an annual expense shows up in months in which no money was spent toward that expense. But I could be wrong of course.
This is what I do, but it’s not optimal if you are using category budgets, because one month of the year it just shows you’re wildly over budget. It works from a personal budgeting standpoint, but not reporting on budgets.
Just mark the annual payment as excluded. If you’ve categorised the monthly transfers into the savings account as “spends” then you’ve already accounted for the spend so no need to account for it again when the single annual payment is made using the funds in the savings account.
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But with the separate account approach are you suggesting I need a separate savings account for each of holidays, small bills I choose to pay annually e.g TV license, road tax, insurance, one for home maintenance etc etc? Isn’t this a lot of admin and not very intuitive? Surely it would be better to be able to spread a large payment over the whole year, so all your monthly breakdowns look sensible? It’s not any different to choosing to pay one of these things monthly instead of annually with the merchant, but instead you are synthetically doing it yourself. It may also be cheaper to actually pay as a one off but pretend you pay monthly in the app.
Some may prefer to have separate accounts or pots, but its not essential. You could have a single savings account which has the purpose of holding all money set aside for annual expenses. Lets say (for example) you have 3 things you pay for once per year: Car Service, TV License, Home Insurance. Divide expected annual amount for each by 12 and setup 3 monthly standing orders to the savings account if you want categorise each in Emma separately (or just a single standing order for the sum of the 3 if preferred). Then when each bill is due, remove a suitable amount from savings account to pay but exclude from analytics. It doesn’t seem me to be much effort even with larger number of annual expenses.
Paying the money into a savings account on a monthly basis (and treating these as spends) achieves this.
I think it would be confusing if monthly analytics are showing you have spent money in months where you haven’t. The only way I could see something the approach you are suggesting working is if Emma provides some kind of credit facility whereby you pay the annual expense via Emma credit (for example) and then pay Emma back across the year.
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Ah I see what you mean (and I already put money away into Starling goals for annual expenses just like this).
Now this is perfect if you know the exact annual price. It’s still potentially not ideal if you don’t know - and it ends up costing more. For example putting money away for car maintenance, servicing, MOT. If you just include your payments to savings and exclude the actual costs, how do you account for it if it costs more?
For small variations I just ignore it and end up paying the extra from my income for the month in which the annual bill is due.
For large variations, what I’ve done in the past is dip into my emergency savings (which I keep separate from my annual expense savings) and exclude that from analytics. Then I’ll gradually replenish the emergency savings and treat those replenishment payments as spends within my spending analytics.
I’ve recently started slightly over-budgeting my monthly payments to my annual expenses savings account (particularly with car maintenance in mind), but haven’t yet figured out what I will do if that leads to build up of significant excess that account.
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This is really helpful, I appreciate you taking the time to explain. Thank you!
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Or even quarterly budgets
I’ve actually reverted doing this because it seemed like it was training incorrect exclusions and causing even more problems than it was worth.
I think a proper solution would still have value.
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This feature would be really useful - being able to set a budget period to monthly/ quarterly/ annual