Jen from Lunch Money:

Hello Jen, I shared the following feedback through a bug report but thought that I can also share it here as well.

Rollover amounts from previous month should not be included in the existing month's budget total. That's because it forces you find budget for that rollover amount in the current month's income even though that was already done in the the past month(s).

This is better explained through an example.

Suppose I earn 1000$ / month. with that income I want to do 2 things :

1. keep 200$ a month for fun.

2. save the remaining 800$ into a savings account.

Also my discretionary spending is variable, so if in a given month I don't spend the entire 200$, I want to rollover whatever I didn't spend to the next month. Here I would expect a budgeting tool like Lunch Money to tell me :

a) for the current month and given past months' expenses, how much I can spend for fun. I can find this out when by setting my fun money category budget to "fixed amount with rollover".

b) for the current month, how much I can put in my savings account. I can usually find this information in the "Net budgeted" line item (because income - expenses = what I can save) of the budget's overview panel on the right hand side.

Now suppose on month 1 I only spend 50$ on fun money. That means on month 2 I can spend 350$ (200$ + 150$ rollover) on fun money, while saving 800$ each month.

For month 1 Lunch Money would tell me both a) and b) correctly. But for month 2, while Lunch Money would tell me a) correctly, for b) it would report that I can only save 650$ instead of the 800$. That's because it deducts the rollover amount as an expense from the budgeted income even though that 150$ was already deducted on month 1.

This makes keeping track of the amount you are really saving each month almost impossible if I have high rollover amounts. In my simple example I can always save the 800$ every month regardless of what Lunch money tells me. But if either my expenses and/or my income vary during a single month, the amount I save won't be a constant 800$ so I'll have to increase the net budgeted amount by the rollover amounts manually myself to find out my true savings amount for that month. Besides that kind of defeats the purpose of using a budgeting tool that does those calculations for you.

FYI Mint.com already does that correctly.

see attached.

Thank you

Jen from Lunch Money: Thanks Jen! This was a major thing I was missing from my previous budgeting app :-)

Jen from Lunch Money: Amazing!! Looking forward to this.

Jen from Lunch Money: I set this up on a couple categories in July but now that we're in August I got new budgets that didn't line up with what I expected. So either the UX around setting it up confused me or else something was off in the calculations. (Example, I set a category to have "$100 with rollover" suggested amounts. Last month I went $44 over so I expected this month to get $56 suggested but it instead populated back at $100)