12 month view for budgeting
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Casey G
I'd love to be able to plan & enter my budgets over a whole year, instead of going one month at a time. See attached for an example of a common spreadsheet format.
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Din from Lunch Money
Merged in a post:
View Full Year Budget
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Thomas Nason
I built a home-grown budget/expense application that is eerily similar to Lunch Money. Meaning, great minds think alike! I am happily surprised how much functionality is in your product that I deem so important as well. As a result, rather than continue to build out my home-grown app (which was never intended for public use - by the way - so no competition there) I have decided to convert over to Lunch Money. And am so happy I did. One aspect of functionality I haven't found in your product yet is the ability to view my entire budget for a single year along with spend and totals. This helps me plan each year and understand how well I am tracking to the full year. I can look at this month by month in Lunch Money but it is much harder to get that 10,000 foot view. I have attached a screen shot from my application. I would love it if you could build something into your budget view or analyze view that would provide this. It's a great planning tool. I am happy to talk about this with anyone on the team if you are interested. Your win is my win. Thanks and keep up with all the good work! - Tom Nason
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Eleanor Lewis
This would be really helpful for eg saving for big expenses within the next few months - a 12 month view, or an option to have maintain/toggle between multiple budget periods
Jen from Lunch Money
Merged in a post:
Budget overview and forecast for many months
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Sahan Godakanda
Its good to see a forecast of a budget for at least six months ahead and if possible for a whole calendar year so we can plan the growth rates of savings or depletion of mortgage loans ect. something like this
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Barbara Feit
This is my biggest disappointment with LM, and I wish I had understood this limitation before investing my time and money. I assumed that a system capable of tracking actual expenses and offering a month‑by‑month budgeting tool would also provide reports comparing actuals to budget by month and year‑to‑date. For me, rollover categories are a much lower priority, since I have relatively few truly flexible categories where a rollover would influence my spending decisions. What matters most is being able to see where I stand year‑to‑date and understand the reasons behind any variances so I can take action if needed. At the very least, having a month‑by‑month budget view that can be exported or downloaded would allow me to manage this in Excel. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible, and I end up spending a lot of time manually manipulating each month and reviewing everything offline. LM is excellent for capturing expenses, but in my view, it still falls short on the budgeting side.
Jen from Lunch Money
Merged in a post:
Budget 12 months (periods) view
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Luca Castiglioni
It would be really usefull to have a view of an annual budget (or of a selected number of months or periods).
I would like to see 12 colums one for each month with a final column with total for each category.
The second wish would be to be able to prepare a master budget in Excel or Google Sheets and the import it in Lunch Money.
These are the steps:
-In LM click a button to export a file with all the categories (rows) and a number of colums for the number of months requested.
-Open this file in Excel and setup the budget as needed.
-Import the file in LM and populate the various categories with the values written in Excel.
If no data is inserted in a cell in Excel LM will mantain the budget value inputed directly. So only where I inserted a value will override LM budget input.
At the office we use a cash flow app called AGICAP and this is one of the possibility you have to input a cash flow forecast. It works really smooth.
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Daniele
Yes this would also solve my problem. I'd really love some better way to compare one month activity to the next. Clicking back and forth and having the page load each time is extremely inconvenient. I'm currently exporting the budget to excel.
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Michael Corbett
This is what I was hoping to see under https://feedback.lunchmoney.app/budget/p/set-a-budget-for-a-year but unfortunately it seem to be missing. It should be possible to view long-term budget vs actual data regardless of what budget period you are using. I imagine being available under Budget or Analyze. Looking at one period at a time makes it hard to see the bigger picture.
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Martin Rushworth
For me, this is what is most missing from the current beta. I have my budget period set to calendar month with rollover so I can track the year monthly as i go, but my expected income and expenses vary quite a bit month by month. My main goal is to fit within a yearly budget. Right now i have to manually add up each months budget to get my annual budget. It would be great to have a view over the whole year, or I guess over multiple periods to suit everyone
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Shane
Martin Rushworth Same
I'm very new to LM but this is the main thing I am trying to figure out how I want to handle. Things like Travel or Home Improvements are going to be very sporadic spending. I want money allocated to them for the year and to know that I will still be within budget, but I have no idea which months the actual spend will come in.
When I go to Home > Overview and set it to This Year, this is basically the view that I want to see. However currently even when setting this to view against the budget, its still not quite there. For example the summary at the top ONLY includes the recurring items and not the sum totals of my budgets.
And then like OP points out, I want to be able to enter all of this at the beginning of the year (now) rather than do it as each month begins.
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Max
I just started using LM, moving from Mint+Excel. I do like many others do, use Mint as aggregator, and spreadsheet for yearly budget. It would be so nice to dump my old spreadsheet and be able to setup my yearly budget in sort of a 12-month view, all at once based on my categories.
The Finance > Analyze tab is very close to what I am looking for. Its great to see spending at a glance. All I would add is the ability to see budget against spendings, and also the ability to set budgets from there)
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Clarence Tso
Max this Finance > Analyze --> Budget is exactly what I came to look for as well! Have a great, helpful YoY report in Analyze and the next step is to convert that into an annual budget from the YoY report.
It's just a lot of extra work to do things month-by-month if you're not looking to spend every week in the budgeting app.
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Pat
I'd like to poke my head in and add context to why this is such an important feature... For a freelancer who's spouse does seasonal work, our incomes are sporadic to say the least. Monthly budgeting is basically useless unless I can look at the whole year exactly like the attached image. Until this feature is available I'll basically have to keep using LM only as an account-aggregator and a auto-categorizer, to export into my own spreadsheet that does this.
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Jovana Puric
Pat
Dear Pat,
Thank you for your thoughtful insight. At the moment we are focusing on implementing this feature so in the future our users will be able to see a whole year budget as suggested. This will allow sporadic income visibility on a yearly budget as well.
We hope this version of LM will match your expectations and allow you to plan and budget your expenses seamlessly.
Best,
Jovana
Lunch Money
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