BUDGET PROFILES
Budget profiles are accessed directly from the main Reports menu or from the Cash Curve.
Consider the following scenario:
Examination of your Cash Curve indicates you have a single month with higher than normal expenses. This means that you have an inadequate cash reserve to meet normal, expected contingencies or a known expense occurring a few months later. In this case, the higher than normal expenses are due to all of your insurances (paid annually) occurring in this month.
A possible way to reduce monthly expenses is to arrange for these to be paid monthly or 3 monthly. This may incur an extra service cost but this may often be recovered by reduced credit card costs (assuming you use these extra funds to pay off any high cost debt). Budget Profiles gives you a way to identify the months with high expenses.
Another way to identify possible expenses is to use the Set & Maintain: Budget option. Consider budgeted expenses where the “Every” column indicates ‘Yearly’, ‘6 monthly’ or possibly ‘3 monthly’.
Budget Profiles compares the budgets for each category:
- Month vs. Month
Select two months to compare. For example you may wish to compare a given month this year and last year. Note that early budgets may not be accurate (depending on how you set these up) - 3 month vs. 3month OR 6 month vs. 6 month
Month to month budgets often show variation simply due to the calendar. Payments made weekly can show variation month-to-month depending on the number of payment days in that month. Averaging over several months removes these variations.
- Month vs. Average
The purpose is to compare the budgeted expenditure in any month with the average.Suppose you had a one off yearly expense of $1,200 mixed in with other expenses for a category for a month. The average 12-month component of this is $100. You look to find months with very much higher than average expenditure. These then possibly have payments that can be paid by more frequent installments.
Average can be for Past 12 months, Next 12 months, Past 6 + Next 6 months. The choice depends on the data available and where the selected month occurs in the 24 months from the current month.
One can use the ‘View Graph’ to also see months of excessive spending for any category. The advantage of the Budget Profiles view is that one can see the results for all categories at once and then use this to decide which category graphs to view.
Most categories have link to View Graph, Transactions (i.e. budget vs. Actuals). These options are available whenever you click on a category’s name:
NON AVAILABLE LINKS
Occasionally you may see a category with no link available. The reason is that there are no budgeted entries for the chosen month, but there are entries when averaged over 12 months.
An example is Electricity paid every 3 months – Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct. These months are currently arranged to show an active link. No link is currently provided for these other months.
Also applies to Income & Expenses
