Budgeting in Endute 101

The full walkthrough: set a plan, let your transactions measure it, and decide what happens to the leftovers.

The model: a monthly plan per category

A budget in Endute is an amount you plan to spend in a category in a month. That is the whole model. You set the plan, your categorised transactions count against it, and the Budget screen shows you where each category stands. Nothing is moved, reserved or locked away, and no money changes hands when you edit a number.

Why plans instead of envelopes

In envelope-style systems the budget is the money: every pound gets assigned somewhere, and spending is an allocation decision you make twice. We built Endute the other way round. Your budget describes intent, and your bank data measures reality against it. The point is not to control each transaction at the moment you make it, but to see clearly, month after month, where reality drifts from the plan. If you want the envelope feeling of balances that persist across months, that is exactly what the rollover setting adds, and it is optional.

Step 1: set your monthly amounts

Open the Budget screen and pick a month with the selector at the top. Click a category and the Edit Budget dialog opens with one amount field per month, January through December, so you can plan a whole year in one visit. Categories with the same amount every month are quicker still: tick Set for all months, type the amount once, and save.

Seasonal categories deserve seasonal numbers. Heating higher in winter, holidays concentrated in summer months you actually travel. The dialog makes uneven plans as easy as flat ones, and the Budget vs Actuals report later shows whether the shape you guessed matches the shape you live.

Step 2: transactions do the counting

You never tell the budget what you spent. Transactions carry a category, whether they arrived through a bank connection or were entered by hand, and Endute tallies each category's spending against its budget for the month automatically. Keeping categorisation tidy is therefore the one habit that keeps a budget trustworthy, and it is most of the work our review flow does for you.

Step 3: read the Budget screen

For the chosen month, every category shows what you budgeted, what you have spent so far, and what remains, with a progress bar doing the glancing for you. Income categories can carry targets too; the mechanics below about rollover apply to spending categories only.

With rollover switched on, categories also show a small chip such as +£6.86 rollover. That is the accumulated surplus or deficit from earlier months, and the category's effective budget for the month becomes its base amount plus that carried balance.

Step 4: look back with Budget vs Actuals

The Budget screen answers "how is this month going". The Budget vs Actuals report, under Reports, answers "how did the plan hold up". It lines budgeted against actual across months, per category or in total, so drift shows up as a pattern rather than a surprise. A category that overruns by a little every single month is not a discipline problem. It is a plan that needs a bigger number.

Rollover: carrying the leftovers forward

Rollover is the optional part, and the part that will feel familiar if you come from YNAB. The toggle lives on the Budget screen, labelled Rollover. When it is on, unspent budget in a category carries forward as surplus, overspending carries forward as deficit, and each month you effectively start from base amount plus everything accumulated so far. Underspend your grocery budget by 20 in March and April quietly gives you 20 more headroom.

Three things worth knowing before you switch it on

Rollover starts counting from the month you first enable it, and switching it off and back on later resumes from that original month. It does not reach back into earlier months, even if budgets and transactions exist there; if you have back-filled a full year and want the accumulation to start earlier, contact support and we will move your start date. The start month itself shows no rollover, since the first carried balance lands the month after. And the Reset option moves your start point to the current month, never backwards: it is a clean-slate button, not an undo.

If you are coming from YNAB

Most of your instincts transfer; the vocabulary does not. The short translation table:

In YNAB	In Endute
Category carryover	The Rollover toggle on the Budget screen.
Ready to Assign / give every dollar a job	No equivalent. Budgets are plans, not allocations, so there is no pool of unassigned money to empty.
Moving money between categories	Edit both categories’ budgets for that month. Nothing moves; the plans just change.
Age of Money	No equivalent. The Budget vs Actuals report is the health check instead.

What next

See the budget tracker overview for how budgeting fits the rest of Endute.
Something not adding up? Check the FAQ or contact support. Budget questions get answered by the people who built it.