Spend 2 Intro
Overview
To get the most out of Spend 2, it is important to understand how it expects you to organize your budgets. Spend does not have a notion of an overall or general budget based on your income; all of the funds that you budget must be allocated to a specific category (budget). For example, you might decide that you want to budget $100 per week on groceries and $50 per month on gas. In this case, you would create two budgets in Spend: one called Groceries with an amount of $100 and a type of weekly, and another called Gas with an amount of $50 and a type of monthly. After you create your budgets, you can add expenses to them as you make purchases in each category, and Spend keeps track of the remaining balance. In effect, it is like each budget is a bank account that receives an automatic deposit every time it cycles, and which you can withdraw and deposit from at will.
Creating Budgets
To create a budget, tap on the plus sign in the bottom right of the app while viewing the Active Budgets list, or any other group’s budget list. The key pieces of information that you will need to pay attention to are the name, amount, type, and especially the start date. The name is essentially the category description like Groceries, Gas, or Entertainment. The amount is how much you want to budget in that category during each cycle. The type of the budget specifies how often it cycles. For example, a $10 weekly budget will add $10 to the budget every 7 days. The start date is very important because it not only determines when the budget begins, but also exactly when it cycles. A budget will not cycle (give you money) or include any items entered into it prior to its start date. The budget will be inactive and listed in the Inactive Budgets group until its start date arrives. The start date also is used to control when the budget cycles, along with the budget’s type. For example, if you have a weekly budget that has a start date of Tuesday, April 7, 2009, this budget will cycle every Tuesday. If you have a monthly budget with the same start date, it will cycle every 7th of the month. You also have the option of specifying an end date for a budget, which is mostly useful for temporary budgets. For example, you might have some budgets related to a vacation trip that will only last two weeks. You can also turn off balance rollover; if balance rollover is off, your budget will reset to its amount each cycle, rather than adding the amount to its current balance.
The Total Budgeted Display
Another common point of confusion is the Total Budgeted display that appears on all group budget list screens, such as the Active Budgets list. The total budgeted amount is the sum of the available balances in all of your budgets at the beginning of their respective current cycles. This amount is not normalized to a set period (e.g. a month) across budgets. For example, if you have a weekly $10 budget and a monthly $100 budget that both started on the 1st of the month, the Total Budgeted will initially display $110. On the 8th of the month assuming you didn’t spend anything yet, the Total Budgeted will be $120 ($100 in the monthly budget plus $20 in the weekly budget). This may not be the most useful piece of information to display, but given the different types of budgets (including a manual one that never cycles), it would be difficult to normalize them in a meaningful way.
More questions? See the FAQ.