Is there a way to describe a recurring payment that happens against a category AND is meant to be for a specific amount in a cycle?
It’s not a budget btw.
Typical example is petrol.
I use about the same amount of petrol monthly.
But i sometimes go to different stations and sometimes I reduel 3 4 or 5 times a months.
The intended behaviour is to have it as recurring so that in my analytics and budgeting it’s considered “committed spending”.
If i can describe similar expenses as committed, then the daily allowance is more precise.
I think you can use a budget for this. Committed spending is just a label we use in the app to show what the app knows is going to happen. If Committed didn’t exist, a budget would still work out.
The reason why I am seeing this is because when you make the actual spend “a committed spend” would move into spending and fall in a budget.
We don’t have a way to allocate manually future spend, but this is something we can pickup with the team.
First a budget means “I aim to spend at most X in this category”, while what i want is “I know I will spend at least X with this category”
And the concept of category is different, in the former is one of the traditional budgeting categories, the second is a more specialised one. i call it category for lack of better word
In fact i already have and use a transport category, which petrol falls into.
Using budgets i should split petrol from transport , and have two categories with different meaning (upper bound vs minimum committed spending).
Beside i want my petrol to be in the transport category, exactly because budgets and committed are quite horthogonal in concept.
In general using budgets means i will have to add many categories like “after school club” for my daughter for things that have already a category.
Having a category means that i can look back and knwo how much i spent for X or Y, so using budgets this way will also break this ability
I would like to have a clear understanding of how much money i can spend within my total budget for the cycle, given that some of that money is already allocated.
I think that being able to describe intuitively what part of that total budget is already allocated helps budgeting for extra expenses and that tools like emma are in the best position to provide such view
In a way, i don’t care about the traditional budgeting “i have that amount allocated which i aim to not exceed”
This is useful when i don’t know what expenses i have, but i slice my total budget to help give me an idea.
With Emma, when I’ve got the data, this concept is almost obsolete, as it is a conservative way of looking at the problem: since i don’t know, i guess an upper bound
With Emma we can do better and I’m really keen in seeing this concept flipped towards “you spent X in petrol as a pattern, so as committed spending it’s projected as X”, making de facto old bsugets obsolete.
Am I wrong saying that for home finaces people want to know how much they spend, how they spend it and how much they can still spend?
