Expenses

What an expense is

An expense in SavingStat is money going out, recorded as a transaction that carries lines. Like every transaction, it has an amount, a currency, a date and the wallet the money left. The lines are what set it apart from the other two types.

Each line holds its own amount, plus a category, a budget, an event and a comment, all of them optional and all belonging to that line alone rather than to the payment as a whole.

That is why one supermarket payment can be part groceries and part something for the flat, filed under two categories and two budgets, without being broken into two payments that never happened. A payment with no lines is money you know left the wallet, and nothing more.

Splitting one payment

The lines live on the transaction's own page under Expense details. You can open and amend a line, remove it, or add another beside it.

Nothing forces the lines to add up to the payment they came from. You can leave a split half done and come back to it later, and the transaction will say so rather than quietly accept it.

What the statuses measure

Three of the statuses an expense can hold are one question asked three ways: do the lines add up to the transaction's amount?

• Pending means the lines come to nothing at all, typically because no line has an amount yet.
• Partial means they come to less than the payment.
• Over budget means they come to more.

Over budget is a misleading name. It has nothing to do with a budget's contents, and no budget can produce it. It only ever means the lines have overshot the payment they came from, which is usually a typo in one of them.

SavingStat recalculates the sum every time a line is added, edited or removed, so a split you are part way through shows as one. The sum runs in the transaction's own currency, not the wallet's, since the payment and each line both keep a figure in each. A draft is never summed. That arithmetic first happens the moment you publish.

Where expenses show up

Expenses are what the spending side of SavingStat is built from. A category's total, a budget's month and the figures on the Stats pages are all sums of expense lines, not of payments.

The payment moves the wallet balance. The lines decide what it is counted as.