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.

The bar's colour is the state of the row. Green means there is budget left. Amber means spending has met the budget to the penny. Red means it has passed it, and the part of the bar beyond the budget is a darker red so you can see by how much. Hover over any part of the bar for the amounts behind it. The mobile app follows the same rule from its next update.

To see what a category usually costs while you type, switch on Show typical spend at the top of the Expenses card. Each spending row gains a line under its bar: the typical amount spent, which is the middle value of your last six full months so one unusual month does not sway it, and the average of the budgets you set in those months. Click the spent figure to use it as this month's budget. A category you only pay a few times a year says so instead, with the count and the yearly total, and a new account says how many full months are still needed. Hover the line for the months behind the figure, an unusual month if there was one, the same month last year, and whether the last three months have been running higher. The switch is remembered, and for now it is on the web app 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.

Notes: why you set that amount

Next to each budgeted amount there is a small speech-bubble icon. Grey means the row has no note; blue means it has one, and hovering shows it. Click the icon to write or change the note, up to 500 characters, then confirm with the tick. The cross clears a saved note. A note belongs to that category in that month, so Car in September can say "MOT due" without October inheriting it.

Two things make month-by-month notes light to keep. Copying a month forward with the copy button carries the notes with the amounts, so a standing reason travels on its own. And when a month has no note but an earlier month does, the grey icon shows that earlier note, for example "From August 2026: MOT due", and the editor offers Use this note to keep it with one click. Nothing is stored until you choose it. Parent categories whose sub-categories are in the budget view carry no note of their own, since their amount is the sum of the rows beneath. Notes are included in the budget export, and the mobile app shows them in the category drawer from its next update.

The planner: make the plan from evidence

The Budget screen is for tracking against a plan. The planner, reached from Plan budget beside the copy button, is where the plan gets made, and it is worth a visit a couple of times a year rather than every month. Each spending category is a row: twelve months of what you spent as bars, the amount we suggest drawn as a dashed line across them, and badges for a scheduled payment, an occasional cost, a rising run or an unusual month. The suggestion is the middle value of your last six full months rounded up a little, because a budget set to the exact average is over budget half the time; a category with a scheduled payment gets that payment instead, and one you only pay a few times a year is spread over the year when rollover is on. Every reason is written under its number.

Work through it in this order. Mark each row Need or Want with the pill, since that is what the savings target uses. Click any month to leave it out of a row's figure, for a holiday or a one-off. Type over any amount you disagree with. Drag the savings target if you want to save a fixed sum a month: it trims only Want rows without a scheduled payment, in proportion, and tells you the most it can find. Then Apply to this month or the next twelve; Undo puts every amount back exactly as it was. The largest transactions of the year sit in a card under the header, each with a link to the transaction and a way to leave its month out.

Review, the other mode, shows how an applied plan held up: what you spent each month against what the plan said, which categories ran over or had room, and by how much. It changes nothing and suggests nothing. A plan that needs adjusting every month is not a plan, so revisit the planner when your life changes, not when a month does.

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. The year end changes nothing: December carries into January like any other month, and the accumulation only restarts if you use Reset.

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. One more: a month with spending in a category but no budget set for it counts as a budget of zero, so that spending rolls forward as deficit. If you plan a year at a time, or copy one month forward with the button, every month has a number and this never comes up.

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.