Chris Cowles
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 Posted:
Mon Nov 14, 2005 9:02 am Post subject:
Budget - new insights |
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One of my major gripes about Money and its inclusion of scheduled bills is
that fact that revising an existing bill has a retrospective effect. I think
I've just figured out how to overcome that. I combined Bill Woods' comments
about putting a termination date in all scheduled bills, with my previous
knowledge that new scheduled bills affects only future budget months.
What I've determined is that, if a bill changes for the future, don't change
the existing bill. Put a termination date in it, then create a new bill
containing the new deposit/payment information. If you look at your annual
budget report after that, you'll find the effect of the old bill stops as of
the final month, and the new bill affects only from the date of the first
transaction.
There are nuances I have yet to fully understand or work around. I'll use my
paycheck as an example. I just got a raise and it will be effective as of my
next paycheck. My paycheck is scheduled, and the last occurrence of the old
amount has already been recorded. The old model remains in the schedule with
a due date of 2 weeks after the last one.
I want to cancel the current paycheck so the new amount doesn't look like it
should have applied in the past. If I simply revise it and leave it in
place, it would make my past in-budget income suddenly be less than the
budget. Wrong. But I can't put a past date in the final payment date (at
least I don't think I can) and if I change the remaining single deposit to
0$, it changes the past budget the same. Also, I don't think you can skip a
single remaining payment, regardless of the frequency.
The limitation of this seems to be that you need to know about the revision
far enough in advance to schedule the final payment of the bill before it
happens. Otherwise you'll always have an extra deposit/bill in the budget in
the last month.
If others can play with this, I'd appreciate hearing their insights.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL
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