Creating "Spending Caps" or "Funds

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SilaBhavana58
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Creating "Spending Caps" or "Funds

Post by SilaBhavana58 »

Hello,

I just started using MMEX after using Google Sheets for a few months. When I was using sheets, I had created my own categories as "funds", where the amount in each category or fund was the amount I was able to spend for anything that would fall under the category. This would make it easier to avoid overspending.

For example, if my food fund was currently at $500 and I got paid at work, I would allocate a percentage of the payment to the food fund. Supposing it increased to 550 after a paycheck allocation, I would then have that much money to spend on food (and I could break it into subcategories if I really wanted). If for some reason I had only 4 dollars in my food fund, I would not be able to buy a big mac without first transferring from another fund, such as the transportation fund, or a fund with a lower priority (and I would be led to consider whether I'm spending too much on food or not allocating enough for my needs). And instead of asking myself if I had enough money based on my overall checking account when I wanted to buy food, I could ask myself if I had enough money in the food fund.

I notice that MMEX has a budgeting function, but the whole system is in different terms than I'm accustomed to. Adding an "amount" to a category in "budget setup" seems to add a predicted expenditure amount for the chosen time period (in my case, the month). So if I were to gain income and categorize it as "food", it wouldn't be added to the food "amount"; it would merely be recorded as income. What this means is that I can't treat the "amount" cell as a "fund", because it wouldn't directly reflect the income gained. As a result, with the "amount" function I can't see how much money I can spend on food, only how much I'm planning to spend, it seems.

I'm wondering am I looking at the wrong place to create a "fund"? Or is this simply not a function available in MMEX?
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