Managing Your Budget

Moneydance's Budget Manager helps you specify your expected income and expenses and compare your expectations to your actual finances. To access the Budget Manager, select Tools -> Budget Manager from the toolbar.

The main budget manager window consists of a list of budgets. From this window you can add, remove or edit budgets.

Moneydance can automatically calculate an initial budget for you based on your transactions during any time period that you specify. To automatically calculate a budget, simply press the Calculate button. The Budget Manager will ask you to input the date range you would like to use to calculate your budget. Enter the appropriate dates and click OK. The information will be put into the currently selected budget.

To set a budget manually, click the "+" button to add a row for each income or expense category that you would like to monitor. Enter the amount budgeted and the time interval (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) for which that amount applies. You can also choose a starting date that indicates when the item should begin to be budgeted as well as the date of the repeating interval. For example, when entering a monthly expense you will probably want to choose the first day of the month as the starting date.

When generating budget reports, the amount you specify will be pro-rated across the chosen interval. So if you are generating a report for the first six months of the year, but have specified an "Annual" interval for the expense, the budget will compare your actual expenses to half of the budgeted value.