Monthly budget not adjusting

I’m unsure if this is a glitch or if for some reason the monthly “available to spend” figure doesn’t update

An example
You have £1000 for the month and you budget £500 for petrol and other expenses. You should have £500 “available to spend”.

If you then spend £100 you should have £400 “available to spend”

In my app the available to spend figure doesn’t alter with my spending which makes the figure a little pointless.

Just bumped this again as I’m really keen to find out if this is a glitch/bug or the way it’s designed. It’s a bit of a big deal for me if the budget doesn’t update with spending

What did you spend your £100 on?
If it was petrol then it wouldn’t impact your available spend as you have already allowed for it.

No, just normal spending. Normal spending, or indeed any spending at all doesn’t update the budget?

I’m struggling to understand what you are seing / expect to see specifically. It’s working as expected for me. The spend I have budgeted for doesn’t show in my daily number, unless I go over, and the unbudgeted amounts track and I go overspent if I spend more than I have available.

So you don’t see something like this…? (Don’t judge, I’ve had a tough week!)

Edit - the reason I like the way Dozens does this is that I have £3.58 AFTER my lunch and travel, so I’m seeing the part of my spend I can actually control / do something about. Looks like a quiet weekend ahead :disappointed_relieved:

IMG_1685

:rofl: no judgement

Ok let’s use your screen as an example.

Your weekly budget was £99. So let’s use round figures that means each day you’d have around £14 to spend and that shows for your daily budget.

You’ve overspent (no judgment!) so your daily budget is currently showing a mighty £1.19. In other words it has adjusted for your overspend. I assume your monthly total also adjusts

Mine doesn’t

If I have a daily budget of £14 and on Monday spend £100,000 I still have a daily budget if £14 for the next day. Lovely if it really were true!

Would someone from dozens look into this perhaps? Budgeting is coreto your app. Absolutely fundamental to your vision. It is also what drove me to trial dozens. If it doesn’t work I will very sadly have to stop using dozens. That would be a real shame because I love the principle behind what dozens are doing

In case it helps with diagnosis mine is currently underspend daily but the budget amount not adjusting (don’t judge Andy!)

Always difficult when behaviour seems to be different on the same app!

Just to note, although my budget is blown for this week it doesn’t impact future weeks just yet, so my ‘left to spend’ reverts to £14.21 a day from Monday, I guess because I can still not spend my final £3.58 for this week if I exert some self control before Sunday night. Unlikely…

Ah - I think what’s happening is that the daily allowance doesn’t go up if you underspend, isn’t the point that you are being encouraged to save your £65.59 surplus? The ‘budget’ number is fixed, what you are tracking is variance to it. So if you spend nothing else this week you have given yourself a nice chunk to move into savings (or blow it if you have no self control).

Maybe @Robert can confirm if this is expected behaviour?

Maybe check your categories. If you’ve linked a category or retailer to a monthly budget item, everything from that will be linked to the budgeted amount, I think

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If you manage to exercise that much self control over the weekend you should consider a monastic career if some sort, that would be impressive!

If the app doesn’t adjust for underspends that would be disappointing. I want the facts and then decide what to do with my money. Seeing a daily budget rising would actually be great incentive not to spend. Extremely interested to here Robs take on what should be happening

Moving to the monthly tab. Has yours moved at all. I’ll stick a pic up in a moment. Mine hasn’t moved. So at the start of the month I had £520 to spend after my pre allocated expenses. I’ve spend some and it still shows £520 to spend. It’s extremely frustrating that I have to try and work out how much I actually have to spend and makes the whole tracking section of the app a little redundant.

That linking thing works fine. There are plenty of transactions that are not linked that have come out this month but the monthly amount left to spend remains, much like me during Oscar speeches, unmoved.

It will not budge from £520.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be able to spend £100,000 and still have £520 left

Do you only have that much left in the account? Have you set up payday, so it knows when more money is coming in?

I understand what you mean now.

I would not expect that number to change because it’s the basis for all your other calculations. Your budget is your budget, it is fixed at the beginning of the month.
The app is tracking your variances to budget. Where you are favourable it’s not saying you were good today, spend some more tomorrow - it’s saying you have a surplus, think about NOT spending it and saving it instead.

Andy it is slowly starting to make sense with one big caveat.

Pick holes in this and perhaps see if I’m not thinking clearly or if indeed there is something that need sorting with the app. (It needs sorting for it to be useful to me but I may be the only one)

If the monthly budget figure doesn’t change/adapt as you spend, as you suspect, then without getting a calculator out there’s no way to see how much you have left to spend this month?

I assume a fair proportion of people get paid a monthly salary?

If that’s the case I assume a fair proportion of people would like to know what they have left for the month taking into account expected and budgeted for items?

So, a very over simplified example:
I get paid £2000
I have expected expenses of £500
I therefore have £1500 to spend for the month

By the 15th of the month I have spent £250 of my expected and budgeted expenses (I wouldn’t expect that to come off the £1500 I have available to spend)

And have spent £600 on all sorts of other stuff

I want to be able to see on my monthly budget page that I have £900 left to spend.

Am I missing something? Is this not a really basic figure that everyone wants? How much you have available to spend before the next salary arrives?

I think that is fair, yes.

The only way I can think of that fits into the way the app displays is to have a month view that looks like an extended week view.
ie a view that shows every day of the month, rather than 7 days, with the budget score being for the month rather than the week.

Scrolling through the weeks does not achieve this, because each week is its own discrete chunk and you don’t get a whole month view.

I think that would work - if you just swapped the headers on the weekly tracking screen to spent this month, amount left until month end, total monthly budget that would give you what you want to see. And you’d get a monthly budget score that would tell you how favourable you’ll be if you stick to your budget for the rest of the month.

Absolutely perfect Andy

That would make perfect sense. @robert is there any chance of reading this thread and commenting?

I really like the way you explained that it could be incorporated but I’d accept any method at all that displayed the amount I had available to spend before next months salary gets paid. It’s a very basic and very important figure.

Thanks for walking through the problem with me Andy, although it doesn’t help in giving me figures that I want and need it does explain the figures on the app a little better. The monthly tab on tracking seems slightly superfluous to requirements with its current display. I assumed that it displayed a dynamic and updating monthly budget but that appears not to be the case.

A possibly more simple update would be to leave the monthly view as is but maybe add a ‘live update’ value in brackets (ie: monthly budget is £2000 income - £700 Monthly Expenses = £1300 Available to spend (£900 remaining) - the (£900 remaining) being the live update taking into account what has been spent so far from the available to spend…

I think its important to show both figures - people want to know what they budgeted and also have a live running total (which could be colour coded to show if you are on track to be under budget - green - or on track to underspend - red)

The same could be done with the Weekly Budget - each day could show your daily budget but with an adjusted figure if you are over budget (I dont think it should do this for overspends as the reducing figure based on overspend is much more valuable) . ie: (assuming a weekly budget of £140 = £20 a day and on Monday I only spent £10)

Monday - +£10
Tuesday - +20 (+£10)
Wednesday - £20
Thursday - £20 . etc…

Does that make sense? - would that meet the need you are after of live updates to budget?

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