A budget in Finthy is a limit on a category for a period. Go to Budgets and choose Create Budget.
If you would rather not start from scratch, Create from Template sets up a whole set at once from a known method. The fields below still apply; the template just fills them in.
Budget Type, the decision that matters most
Pick this before the amount, because it decides how the budget behaves when you go over.
- Fixed: a strict spending limit, with alerts as you approach and exceed it. Best for essentials like rent, where the number is not really negotiable.
- Flexible: allows slight overages with warnings. Suited to variable spending like groceries, dining out and entertainment, where a hard limit would just cry wolf.
- Target: tracks progress toward a goal rather than against a limit. This is the one for a holiday fund, an emergency fund or a large purchase. It counts up, not down.
The rest of the form
- Select Category, required. A budget on a category includes its subcategories, so a budget on Food covers groceries and restaurants beneath it without listing them.
- Budget Name, optional. Without one the budget is known by its category.
- Budget Amount, the limit, or the goal if the type is Target.
- Period Type: Monthly, Weekly, Bi-weekly, Quarterly, Yearly or Custom. Six options, not three.
- Start Date, and End Date for a custom period. Finthy shows you what your first period will be before you commit, which is worth reading if you picked an unusual start.
- Enable Rollover, which carries unused budget into the next period. See below, because it cuts both ways.
- Enable Alerts and Alert Threshold, a whole number from 0 to 100. The threshold is the percentage at which Finthy says something.
- Notes, optional, for why the number is what it is. Useful six months later.
Save with Create Budget, or Save & Add Another to keep going.
Rollover carries deficits too
Enable Rollover is usually explained as carrying leftover money forward, and it does: an underspent period hands its surplus to the next one.
It also carries the other direction. If you overspend, the overage is deducted from your next period: Finthy tells you the budget was over by an amount and that it will come out of the next period. That is the honest behaviour of a rollover budget and the reason to think before enabling it on a category you routinely overshoot.
Alerts
With alerts on, Finthy raises one when spending crosses your threshold, when you are approaching the limit, when the budget is exceeded, when the period is about to end, and when a rollover lands.
Alerts always appear in Finthy. Whether they also reach your inbox is the single email toggle in Settings > Notifications, not a per-budget setting.
Choosing the first number
- Start with your largest categories. A budget on a small category changes little.
- Look at what you actually spent. The template flow shows a monthly average per category, and that average is a better starting point than a round number.
- Two or three budgets is a real start. Twenty budgets created in one sitting tend to be abandoned together.