Budgets only track negative transactions (expenses) but should also track postive transactions (income, reimbursements)
Currently, as far as we can determine, a budget (either one-off or reocurring) only takes into account negative valued transactions (expenses) and does not consider positive value transactions (income, gifts, or reimbursements). When you set a budget you say how much you are willing to spend, and you track all the transactions using a defined label. If during the budget period you have a positive valued transaction and assign it the budget label, Wallet does not take into account that transaction and update the remaining budget value. This doesn't make sense to us. We give you some real examples
Imagine we have a 'Hawai Vacation' budget for a trip in 6 months time with the total value of $1000. The budget tracks all transactions with the label 'Hawaii Vacation'. We book an Airbnb totalling $350. This transaction appears in Wallet and we tag it with the 'Hawaii Vacation' label. The budget updates correctly. Total budget remaining = $650. But then our Airbnb cancels so they issue a refund of $350. That $350 appears in Wallet *during the defined budget period) as a positive value. We assign the label 'Hawaii Vacation' to the transaction. With this refund the total remaining budget should = $1000 - $350 + $350, so $1000. However Wallet doesn't account for the positive value and so the remaining budget is still $650. Which is incorrect. The remaining budget should be $1000. Now when we go book new accommodation we get constant warnings saying that we are overspending on our budget. But we actually haven't. This is just one situation we recently encountered to illustrate the point.
Imagine if you planned a wedding. You have a set budget. But during the planning you receive donations from friends towards the wedding. You don't want to spend more just because of your generous friends donation, so you keep the total budget set at your original value. In this case it just means your personal expense for the wedding is less, thanks to your good friends. Again, Wallet should account for both positive and negative valued transactions.
At the very least, when creating the budget you should have the basic option to track positive and negative valued transactions.
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Sebastián López commented
Thank you so much, the problem has been solved, I had this issue for at least a year and finally I can get more use of the app because of this issue solved.
I would just recomend that at the bottom of the analytics for the budget, Its also shown a graph for the income of that budget, as it is shown for the expenses.
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Sebastián López commented
Totally agree. Actually I don’t use the budgets for that same reason and instead I have to do an extra step exporting it to excel and analysing my budgets in there.
Please give us the option to include or not the income related to the budget tag in our budgets.
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Tereza Böhmova commented
I think the same, also including transfers would be great (for example for sending money to saving account)