Expenses

What an expense is

An expense is money going out. Like every transaction it carries an amount, a currency, a date and the wallet the money left. What makes it an expense rather than one of the other two types is that it also carries lines.

Each line holds its own amount, and with it a category, a budget, an event and a comment. All of those are optional, and all of them belong to that line alone rather than to the payment as a whole.

This 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 than that.

Splitting one payment

The lines live on the transaction's own page under Expense details. One can be opened and amended, removed, or another added beside it.

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

What the statuses are measuring

Three of the statuses an expense can hold are one question asked three ways. Do the lines come to the transaction's amount?

• Pending means they come to nothing at all, usually because no line has been given an amount yet.
• Partially Completed means they come to less than the payment.
• Over Budget means they come to more.

Over Budget is a misleading name. It is not about 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.

The sum is worked out again every time a line is added, edited or removed, so a split you are part way through says so. It is done in the transaction's own currency rather than the wallet's, since the payment and each line both keep a figure in each. It does not run on a draft: the arithmetic first happens at the moment you publish.

Where they 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.