A short overview of Buddy the Budget Helper and the terms you’ll see throughout the app and this help.
Buddy uses the envelope style of budgeting, you define your spending categories and your planned spend amount (budget) for that category.
Buddy helps you track actual spending against your planned budget. It is designed to import transactions from your accounts, help you assign them to the right categories, and summarize transactions into totals by year and month.
Buddy works at the individual transaction level. You decide how every transaction affects its category and budget. A single transaction can be assigned to multiple categories.
Buddy uses a flexible, spreadsheet-like approach to show budget versus actual amounts by year and month. You choose the order in which categories are displayed.
Buddy supports multiple levels of category roll-ups. For example, “Car Payment”, “Car Insurance”, and “Car Registration” can roll up to “Total Car Expenses”, which can roll up to “Total Living Expenses”.
Buddy speeds things up by automatically suggesting categories based on transaction history, payee nanme, and the account’s default category.
Buddy is reconcilable and accurate to the penny.
Accounts are the bank or credit accounts you track (e.g., checking, savings, a credit card). Define your accounts in Setup → Accounts.
Categories are how you group spending and income (e.g., Groceries, Rent, Salary). Define your categories in Setup → Categories.
Budgets are your planned amounts per category. Define your budgets in Setup → Budgets or via Import.
You can work with monthly or yearly budget amounts depending on how you set up your category. Some items (e.g., “Mortgage Payment”) might be budgeted monthly. Others (e.g., “Home Insurance”) might be budgeted yearly, regardless of when the payment occurs. Using both keeps large yearly payments from over-stating your monthly view.
Controls how categories are organized and displayed (e.g., order, hierarchy, which totals appear). You choose how many pages you want and what appears on each line. For example, you might have one page for spending and another for income. Define your page layout in Setup → Categories.
Transactions are the individual debits and credits from your accounts (imported or entered). Each month you download transactions from your bank or credit card site and import them into Buddy.
Buddy uses accounting-style debits and credits: the sign of the amount has meaning. Debits are money out (checks, charges); credits are money in (returns, payments). Debits are positive and add to the category total. Credits are negative and subtract from it. You can “flip” the sign of imported transactions if your bank uses the opposite convention.