Table of Contents
Introduction
One of the main purposes of using a personal finance manager is budgeting and planning. When you plan your spendings you allocate certain amount of money for each purpose like food, bills, car, kids, etc. You should be very careful to make your budgets doable and at the same time your salary should cover all of them.
MoneyWiz for iPad makes it really easy to manage your budgets. By manage, we mean the following actions:
- Add budget
- Edit budget
- Delete budget
- Reorder budgets
Orientation
If you have already set up your account you should be able to tap the Budgets button. Tapping on budget will show you all of your budgets, if you have created any, and the Add budget button.
Budgets in MoneyWiz for iPad are highly customizable and yet very easy to set up.
Adding a budget
a. To create a budget tap the “Add budget” button. Please, notice that the list of budgets is scrollable, so if you don’t see the “Add budget” button, just scroll the list up, and it will appear.
b. You will see a screen allowing you to configure your budget.
Few things should be noted here:
- The help button on the top right corner. If you feel you need more information on how to configure a budget you can always quickly check the in-app help.
- Accounts to monitor: by default a budget should monitor the expenses in all of your accounts. You can change that if you feel you want the budget to monitor specific accounts but not all.
- Name: Enter the name of your budget, for example: “Entertainment”
- Amount: enter the maximum amount of money you think you should spend on this budget.
- Currency: you can also select currency. By default the local currency is selected
- Categories to monitor: select one or more categories that this budget will monitor. This means that the budget will include all expenses in any of these categories. All other expenses are excluded from this specific budget.
- Start date: This is the date when the budget will start looking for expenses. If you set a date in the past, the budget will get all expenses that appeared in the past starting from that selected date. If you set a date in the future, the budget will be inactive until this date arrives.
- Repeat: if you make expenses covered on this budget on regular basis, you should set Repeat to ON. On the other hand, if you intend to use this budget for something temporarily, for example birthday party or vacation, you may need to set Repeat to OFF.
- Frequency: indicate how often the budget should restart. You can choose between days, months and years and you can enter any value you want. For example if you choose 1 Month, this means that the budget will repeat monthly (set this way by default); if you choose 7 Days, the budget will repeat weekly; and if you choose 3 months, the budget will repeat quarterly.
- Transfer unused money: select ON if you want the app to automatically transfer the unused money for this budget, to the next budget period. For example, if you’ve budgeted 300 USD per month, but you’ve used only 250 USD this month, 50 USD would be transferred to the next month’s budget only, so the budget for the next month will be 350 USD.
- End date: if you set the Repeat to OFF, then you need to select when this budget ends. The budget will only monitor expenses made during the period of the start date and end date.
c. Tap “Create” to complete the budget creation. The Budget should be successfully created in MoneyWiz for iPad.
Editing a budget
Given that you’ve already created at least one budget, you will see it when you tap the Budgets button. All your budgets are listed with their name, maximum amount and colorful indicator. Depending on how much money you’ve spend in this specific area for the given period of time, this indicator is filled differently.
To edit a budget you need to go to Settings, then Accounts & Budgets. Select the budget you wish to edit and tap the Edit button.
You can interact with the budget’s properties the same way as when you created it. There is one exception, though. If you need to change the Transfer unused money, the change will become effective from the next period on.
Deleting a budget
To delete a budget you need to go to Settings, then Accounts & Budgets, select the budget you wish to delete and tap the Edit button. Once the Edit screen appears you will find a red “Delete” button on the bottom. Tap “Delete” and MoneyWiz for iPad will prompt an alert. Deleting a budget will not lead to deleting any transactions, your other data will be safe too.
Reordering budgets
If you need to change the order of your budgets you need to tap Settings (the button with a gear), then select “Accounts & Budgets”.
Tap the Reorder button and you will see a three-lined icon on the right side of each budget. To reorder budgets tap on this icon and hold for a second. When you are in edit mode, move your finger up or down to place the budget where you want. To exit this mode, just tap Done.
Budget indicators
Each budget has two indicators, which you can see when you select the budget.You can choose what you want to see in these indicators from the following options:
- Remaining: it shows you the amount of money that you allowed yourself to spend in this area.
- Used: it shows you the amount of money that you have already spent in this area.
- Days left: it shows you in how many days the budget will restart.
- Daily Allowance: it shows you how much you should spend on an average day if you don’t want to overspend.
Creating a transaction
In the bottom right corner of the screen there is an Add expense transaction button. You can create transactions from budgets which in some cases may be better for you. When creating a transaction from a budget, you can select a category which is monitored by this budget. This makes the list of categories significantly shorter and may save you some time.
Summary
In MoneyWiz for iPad budgets are as quickly accessible as accounts. Note that the list of budgets in MoneyWiz for iPad is scrollable and if you happen to use more than five different budgets, you should simply scroll or flick through the list of budgets. This way you will be able to see all of them, including the “Add budget” button at the bottom of the list.
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