Budgets

The Budgets view lets you set a budget for any account, separately for each currency, so your actual spending can be tracked against it using dashboards. The unit of a budget is an (account, currency) pair, so the same account can carry an independent budget in each currency you use (see Multiple currencies); each is effective from a date and holds until you change it (see Effective-dating). Budgets are saved into your ledger, so they travel with your data. For the exact storage format and the full semantics, see the Budgeting reference.

Setting a budget

Open Budgets from the sidebar. The view lists one row per (account, currency) pair you budget, with two amount columns:

Budget — what’s in effect for that account and currency, as of the date in the Budget as of filter (today by default). This column is read-only.
New budget — enter an amount here (with an interval and effective date) to change the budget going forward. Saving adds a new budget effective from that date; the earlier budget still governs the earlier period. A row with a pending entry is marked Edited.

Stage as many changes as you like across rows, then click Save Changes below the table to commit them together; Reset discards the staged entries. A per-row status icon shows Edited, Saved, or — if a write fails — an error you can hover for the reason.

Quick-add row (top): budget an account and currency you haven’t budgeted yet — enter account, currency, interval, amount, and effective date, then Add.
Filters: narrow by account name, set the Budget as of date, and — when you budget in more than one currency — filter by Currency.

The budget editor is also reachable from the Accounts view: open an account’s detail drawer and click Manage in the Budget section.

Managing budget history

Setting a New budget always adds a budget going forward; it never rewrites the past. To correct or remove an earlier budget, expand a row with its ▸ chevron to open Manage history — the full timeline for that account and currency. There you can:

Edit or delete an individual past or current budget in place. These changes apply immediately (they are corrections to the record, not staged forward changes).
End budget — stop budgeting this account and currency from a date you choose, keeping the earlier budgets (see Ending a budget).

Good to know

These concepts affect what your budgets mean and what the dashboards show. They’re summarized here in plain terms; for the full detail — including the exact directive format Finzytrack writes into your ledger — see the Budgeting reference.

Effective-dating

A budget applies from its effective date until a later budget for the same account and currency replaces it. To change an amount mid-year, add a new budget with a later date — the earlier one still governs the earlier months. That’s exactly what the New budget column does: it adds a budget going forward without touching the past.

Ending a budget

End budget — in a row’s Manage history — stops budgeting an account and currency from a date you choose, without deleting the record of what you budgeted before. From that date the account drops out of budget-vs-actual tracking, while the earlier budgets remain for the periods they governed.

Ending is different from budgeting 0. A budget of 0 is a real target of zero — spending against it counts as over budget. An end means there is no budget at all from that date. To resume budgeting, set a new budget with a later effective date; to undo an end, delete it in Manage history.

Inheritance

A budget on a parent account is compared against spending on that account and all of its sub-accounts. A budget on Expenses:Food covers Expenses:Food, Expenses:Food:Restaurants, and so on. If you also budget a child account, that child is tracked as its own line and still counts toward the parent — they overlap by design.

To set one total budget for a whole area — the top-down / zero-based way — just budget the grouping account: pick it from the account dropdown when setting a budget. You can even budget your entire expenses by selecting the Expenses account (how the root is stored). The Budget: Zero-based dashboard turns such a total into named carve-outs plus an “Unbudgeted” remainder, with a sunburst carving it all the way down. Total budgets are shown only in that top-down view — the other (bottom-up) dashboards ignore them so they don’t double-count.

Multiple currencies

A budget applies only to its own currency; spending in other currencies is ignored for that budget. The same account can carry a separate budget in each currency, tracked side by side — for example a USD budget and an INR budget on Expenses:Food, each compared only against spending in its own currency. Budget dashboards work in one currency at a time (a Currency parameter), since amounts in different currencies can’t be summed into a single variance.

Choosing a budgeting style

Budget tracking is done with dashboards. Finzytrack ships a demo dashboard for each common style — open the Dashboards view, pick the one that matches how you like to budget, and copy/tweak it if needed. The “allocation philosophy” (how you arrive at the numbers — zero-based, 50/30/20, pay-yourself-first) is just how you choose what to enter; the tracking is the same machinery.

If you budget like this…	Use this demo dashboard	What it shows
A fixed amount per account each month, at a glance	Budget: Overview	Headline KPIs — total budgeted, spent, remaining — a per-account progress list, and the spending that falls outside any budget
Unspent money rolls over to next month	Budget: Envelopes	Every envelope’s balance at a glance; click one to drill into its month-by-month available, spent, and carryover
One total for an area, a few named sub-budgets, rest lumped together	Budget: Zero-based	Named carve-outs plus an “Unbudgeted” bucket that sums back to the total, with a sunburst carving it all the way down
”How have I done, month by month?”	Budget: History	Budget vs actual month by month over any window (defaults to the trailing year), plus a per-account adherence heat-map (green under, red over)

Two more popular styles don’t need their own dashboard — they’re quick recipes over the same machinery, covered under Build your own below:

50/30/20 (and pay-yourself-first) — the Overview dashboard with budgets set on your Needs/Wants/Savings group accounts, plus a proportion donut. Same no-rollover math, just three groups and different labels.
Pace / burn-down (“am I on track this month?”) — a cumulative line of budget vs actual for one account, built as a single widget.

Build your own budget dashboard

The demo dashboards just work once you’ve set your budgets — they already cover every budgeted account, so most people never edit one. Change a dashboard only to show something different from the demo; when you do, copy a demo and adjust it.

1. Set your budgets first

A budget dashboard only has something to show once you’ve set budgets. Add them in this Budgets view (above) for the accounts you want to track. Then make sure you’re looking at a month or date range that actually has spending, in the right currency.

2. Copy the demo that matches your style

Open Settings → Dashboards, select the demo from the list (e.g. Budget: Overview), and copy its JSON. Either edit it in place, or — to keep the original as a reference — paste it into a new dashboard and give it a new id and title. The editor validates as you go and shows a live preview.

3. Adjust it — usually nothing to change

With your budgets set, the demos work as-is; adjust the parameters to taste:

Overview / History — no structural change. They cover every budgeted expense account (and, for Overview, the whole-expenses “Unbudgeted” remainder) automatically. Set the From/To and Currency parameters to taste.
Envelopes — no structural change either; it lists every budgeted account with its current balance, so click any envelope to drill into its trend. Balances accumulate from each envelope’s first budget (so what you see is the real balance, not a window that resets); use As of to evaluate at a past date, and Start fresh to deliberately reset an envelope to empty on a chosen date.
Zero-based (catch-all) — pick your umbrella account in the Total account selector: a grouping account like Expenses:Insurance, or your whole expenses by selecting the Expenses root. Set a total budget on it plus budgets on the children you want named; everything else rolls into Unbudgeted.

To change accounts, columns, or the underlying SQL, see the Dashboard & Widget Recipes reference for the full format.

Other styles (build-your-own)

Two popular styles are recipes over the same building blocks rather than seeded dashboards:

50/30/20 — group your expenses under Needs / Wants / Savings accounts and set a monthly budget on each of the three groups. The Overview dashboard then tracks them like any other budget (inclusive-parent covers each group’s subtree). Add a proportion donut to see the actual split against the 50/30/20 ideal: a pie chart (radius: ["40%","68%"]) over a query of actual spend per group. It’s the same no-rollover math — only which numbers you enter changes.
Pace / burn-down — “am I pacing to stay under this month?” is one widget: a query for per-period actuals + a budget_for_range (groupBy: "period") step, joined with joinByPeriod, then runningSum (fields: ["budget","actual"], orderBy: "period") to get cumulative series, plotted as a line chart. The actual line crossing above the budget line means you’re pacing over. Drop it into the Overview (or any dashboard) as an extra widget rather than a whole dashboard.

Troubleshooting — “my dashboard is empty”

The widgets should degrade gracefully (you’ll see a short message, not a broken panel). If a budget widget is empty or showing blanks, check, in order:

Budgets are set for the accounts the widget covers (Budgets view).
The selected month / date range has spending — the example data may not cover the current month; pick a populated one.
The currency matches your budgets and postings.
For zero-based, the Total account you picked has a budget (a grouping account, or the Expenses root). If your named budgets add up to more than the total, that’s over-allocation — the top-level “Unbudgeted” slice goes negative (and drops out of the sunburst). (Overview, Envelopes, and History need no swap — they cover every budgeted account automatically.)

Or let the AI assistant build it

If you’d rather describe what you want, the assistant can build or adjust a budget dashboard for you — see below.

Asking the AI assistant

If you have AI configured, the assistant can answer budget questions (“what’s my Food budget in June?”, “am I over budget on groceries this year?”) and build or adjust budget dashboards for you. Setting budget amounts, though, is done by you in this view — the assistant reads and composes, it doesn’t set your numbers.