Overview

MyBudget is a personal-finance tool for keeping track of where your money is, where it is going, and whether your spending is on plan. Unlike a spreadsheet or a simple ledger, MyBudget separates what actually happened from what you intended to happen, so you can see at a glance whether reality is keeping up with the plan.

The four building blocks

The whole application is built around four concepts. Read them once now — the rest of this manual just elaborates on them.

Accounts

Buckets that hold money or track spending. Each account has three independent properties — Transaction or Planning, Debit or Credit, Frozen or Liquid — which together determine what kind of account it is. See Accounts for the full table of types.

Transaction accounts mirror something in the real world: a chequing account at your bank, a credit card, a mortgage, a term deposit. The balance in MyBudget should always agree with the balance the bank sees.

Planning accounts track categories rather than real balances. They show the difference between what you planned and what actually happened — for example, if you budgeted $1,200 for groceries this month and have spent $900 so far, the Groceries planning account holds $300.

Transactions

Real-world events — a salary deposit, a card purchase, a transfer between accounts. Every transaction is made up of two or more splits and uses double-entry bookkeeping: every increase in one account is matched by an equal decrease somewhere else, so the splits always sum to zero. See Transactions.

Plans

Recurring (or one-off) rules that describe what you intend to happen — the weekly pay-cheque, monthly rent, the daily interest accruing on a term deposit. Plans only ever target planning accounts. As real transactions flow through the corresponding planning account, its balance shows whether you are on track. See Plans.

Forecasts

Projections showing how your cash position will evolve given your current plans. Forecasts allow you to make informed decisions beyond your current plans, whether that is about immediate unplanned spending or about possible changes to them. Forecasts answer questions such as:

  • Can I afford to go out for dinner tonight?

  • When can I afford that new TV?

Forecasts also show you how well you are positioned to weather any sudden unexpected expenses. See Forecasts.

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How the four concepts relate.

A worked example

Suppose your pay of $4,500 lands in your chequing account on the 1st of every month. You’d model this as:

  • a transaction account Chequing (Debit, Liquid),

  • a planning account Salary (Income — Debit, Liquid),

  • and a monthly plan of $4,500 into Salary

When the actual paycheck shows up in your bank’s CSV export and you import it, MyBudget records a transaction with two splits: +$4,500 on Chequing and −$4,500 on Salary. The plan instalment for Salary and the transaction for Salary cancel each other out, so the Salary account stays at zero — that zero is the signal that “reality matched the plan”. If your employer were to short-pay you one month, Salary would show a positive balance equal to the shortfall and you would know straight away that something was off.

Groceries are a softer case: you might budget $1,200 a month but in any given week spend more or less. The Groceries planning account will fluctuate around zero rather than sitting on it. A small fluctuation is normal; a steady drift in either direction means the plan needs to be adjusted.

Getting started

  1. Launch the app. From the welcome dialog, create a new .mbgt budget file (or open an existing one).

  2. Add your first transaction account — typically your everyday chequing account. Give it a name and an opening balance dated some time in the past (one or two weeks ago is a good default — recent enough that you can find the corresponding statement, far enough back that there are some transactions to import).

  3. Import transactions since that opening balance from a CSV export downloaded from your bank. See Importing from a CSV file.

  4. Balance the imported transactions, creating planning accounts as needed to categorise them. See Balancing.

  5. Create plans for your regular income and expenses, attached to the planning accounts you just created.

  6. Switch to the Forecasts tab to see your projected cash position.

You can keep things rolling by importing a fresh CSV every week or two, balancing the new transactions, and tweaking plans whenever you change your spending intentions.

Getting help

This manual is built into the application. F1 opens it at the page for whatever you are looking at — press it on the Plans tab and you land on Plans, press it in the Split Plan dialog and you land on Splitting a plan. Dialogs answer F1 themselves, so you do not have to close one to find out what a field means.

Help → Contents does the same thing from the menu bar.