Budgets

What a budget is

A budget is a named container that spending belongs to: Household, The flat, Wedding. It carries a name, a description and an emoji, one owner, and the members that owner invites.

The colour is not one of them. A colour is stored against your own membership rather than against the budget, so it is yours alone and the same budget can read in a different colour for each person in it.

Any expense can name a budget, and the budget's page reports what has gone through it. That is the whole of the mechanism.

It is not a spending limit

A budget holds no number you are meant to stay under. There is no such field on it, so nothing blocks a payment, refuses it, or raises a warning because of what a budget already contains. A budget is a way to group spending, not a cap on it.

This is worth stating plainly because of a badge you may have met. A transaction can be marked Over Budget, and the name is misleading: it is not about a budget at all. One payment can be split across several expense rows, and the badge appears when those rows add up to more than the payment they came from: a split that does not balance.

So the badge is a complaint about the arithmetic inside one transaction, fixed by correcting the split amounts. It never refers to a budget's total, and no budget can produce it. Only expenses are checked this way, never income or transfers.

Who can see it

Everyone in a budget is either its owner or a member, and an invitation sits as pending until accepted. Until then they see nothing.

An owner cannot invite just anyone: the other person must already have an accepted connection with them. Joining a budget therefore takes two acceptances. The connection comes first, then the budget itself.

Getting out again is two different actions, and they do very different things. Archiving is personal: it moves the budget off your active list into an Archived view of your own, asks you to type the word to confirm, and leaves everyone else's list exactly as it was. The budget carries on without you noticing it.

Leaving is the one that moves data. Your expenses cannot stay filed against a budget you are not in, so they are taken out and put into a new budget of your own, named after the one you left and carrying a note explaining where it came from. The spending goes with you rather than staying with them. The owner removing you does the same thing, so a member who has spent anything never simply disappears from the figures.

Its own categories

Open a budget and you get the categories that have actually turned up in it: the list is derived from the expenses filed against the budget rather than configured on it. Its categories are whatever its spending has been labelled with.

Each is marked as one of the defaults or as one somebody made, and any not already in your own list can be added from there, which is how a category the other person uses reaches your picker.

What the totals mean

The figures on a budget cover the current calendar month, first day to last. That is not a running total since the budget was created, and there is no date range to change.

Four cards carry them. Total Spent is the whole budget's figure and is only worked out where the budget has more than one member. Alone in one it is not withheld so much as absent, and the card reads zero rather than going away, so Your Share beside it is the number to read there.

Transactions counts expense lines rather than payments, so one payment you split across two categories is counted twice. Collaborators counts everybody attached to the budget, including anyone whose invitation is still sitting pending and who, as above, can see none of this yet.

Amounts convert into the currency in your settings, so a budget fed by wallets in different currencies still resolves to one number.