Plan #

The budget shows one month at a time: what you planned, what you spent, what is left. The Plan view shows the same budget as a spreadsheet across several months — one row per envelope, category, tag or savings account, one column per month — so you can put next spring’s holiday or an annual insurance premium into the plan long before the money moves.

Both views belong to the same budget. Switching between them changes nothing about your data; it only changes how much of the budget you are looking at.

In this section #

• Opening the Plan view
• Reading the sheet
• Planning a month
• Copying an amount forward
• Adding up a selection
• The Balance row
• Keeping a long sheet readable

Opening the Plan view #

Open your budget from Budget & Plan in the sidebar, then switch the Budget / Plan tabs beside the months bar to Plan. The Plan view works on desktop and on a tablet.

On a phone there is no grid: the budget stays a single-month view, and you plan a month from each row’s sheet — tap the row’s figures and press Set budget (Set plan on a savings row). See Budgeting.

Reading the sheet #

Rows are the elements of your budget, in the structure you gave it, under the same Income, Savings and Expenses sections as the budget view.

Each cell shows the amount actually spent or earned on the left, in small grey type, next to the amount you planned. An actual figure that overshoots the plan is shown in red. A blank cell means nothing is planned for that month and nothing happened. On a savings row, the small figure is the account’s balance at the end of that month.

Click an actual figure to list that month’s transactions behind it.

The ‹ and › arrows above the sheet move the visible window to earlier and later months.

Planning a month #

The sheet works like a spreadsheet:

1. Click a cell to select it, or move to it with the arrow keys.
2. Type the amount, or press F2 to edit the amount already there.
3. Press Enter to save, or Escape to leave the cell as it was.

Delete clears a cell’s plan, and you can paste an amount copied from elsewhere.

Income rows are planned exactly the same way — a planned salary is what makes the projection at the foot of the sheet worth reading. A selected cell with a comment opens its thread with Shift+F2.

Copying an amount forward #

Most plans repeat: the same rent, the same phone bill, month after month. When a cell is selected, a small square appears at its bottom-right corner — Copy budget to the following months. Drag it to the right to repeat that amount across the months it covers.

Adding up a selection #

On desktop you can select several cells at once — drag across them, Shift+click the far corner of a range, or Ctrl+click (⌘+click on a Mac) to add single cells. A small label under the selection adds them up: how many cells, their Plan total and their Actual total.

The Balance row #

The foot of the sheet sums each month: Income, Expenses, Savings and Total savings, with the Balance row pinned underneath. Balance rolls your money forward month by month, starting from your real account balances, so each column shows what you would be left with by the end of that month if the plan holds.

That is what makes planning ahead useful: put a two-week trip into next July and you can see immediately what it does to the months after it.

Keeping a long sheet readable #

A budget with a few dozen elements makes for a tall sheet. A few things help:

• The Income, Savings and Expenses headers, and each folder header, collapse with the chevron beside them. The Plan view remembers its own folding, separately from the budget view.
• The Σ button on a section or folder header shows that group’s sums on its header row.
• Drag the right edge of the name column to make it wider or narrower; double-click the edge to reset it.