Hi,
In my budget page with all my custom categories the top has a total. How is this generated? It would be useful if it was a total left of the sum of my categories budgets, but I don’t think it is?
Thanks,
Ros
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Until seeing this thread I hadn’t been using category budgets (I had nothing explicitly set on the budgets page) and in this scenario Emma seemed to me to be automatically setting total budget as the sum of all income.
I’ve just taken a look at the budget page and that seems to have changed the behaviour. And the behaviour does seem confusing to me too.
When starting from scratch (after clicking disable all) ‘total budget’ and ‘category budget total’ seem to remain coupled. In other words as long as you only increase the values for individual category budgets it gets reflected in both totals. But when you decrease a value in a category budget that change only seems to get reflected in ‘category budget total’ but not ‘total budget’.
I believe the ability to decouple ‘total budget’ and ‘category budget total’ is by design (this is useful for example if you only want a category budget for a small number of categories but not for everything you spend on) but it is confusing we don’t have the option to tell Emma to explicitly link ‘total budget’ to ‘category budget total’.
I’ve also to noticed that after playing around with the budget page there doesnt seem to be an obvious way for me to go back to my previous setup - ‘total budget’ defined by total income. Emma doesn’t seem to now allow me to to save a category budget page with everything disabled (my previous setup). Could someone from Emma advise how to do this?
In my opinion for clarity there needs to be more explicit user settings for how ‘total budget’ is defined. At least the following should be options
- Manually set ‘total budget’
- ‘Total budget’ coupled to ‘category budget total’
- ‘Total budget’ set to sum of income
The top is the sum of all the budgets below - you can make it greater but not lower than the sum of the categories. 
Like I want to spend £1500 this month, but only want to track £200 in groceries and £150 in transport.
Thanks. Is there a way to stop it adding certain categories as spent? It would be useful to have a sum of all my disposable categories such as entertainment, eating out etc, but not bills. I am paid four weekly so my bill total changes each month.
You don’t need to set Bills, just put 0.
But in the spent total does it not add up amount spent in categories set to zero?
How do you go back to total budget being set based on income (which is how it seemed to be behaving for me before I started playing around with category budgets today)?
If I select “disable all” and then click save the following message pops up…
We removed it based on income about a year ago - some old users still have it. Can you ping live chat? They can check it from there. 
Ah, I didn’t realise total budget coupled to income had been removed. I guess I must have been one of the users who still had it until I started playing with the budget screen a couple of days ago.
What approach is now taken before someone explicitly sets values in budgets page? Specifically, is the pay period budget circle now absent until someone explicitly sets a total budget using the budget page?
My preference would be for total budget coupled to income to still be an option.
Correct. Unless the user sets a total budget, they won’t see anything on the Analytics screen but this doesn’t happen as you have to set a total budget when you first sign up. Existing users can’t exit without setting one if they go to make changes
That’s a shame.
It would be good to still have the option to couple total budget to income.