Rollovers let you carry any leftover amount in an expense budget category into the next month. This can be helpful if you don't know the exact amount you plan to spend in a category such as restaurants, groceries, or entertainment. It can also help with seasonal categories - like clothing, holiday gifts, or summer camps - where you spend very little some months and larger amounts in others.
Starting balance on a rollover
Turning rollovers on or off
There are two places you can turn rollovers on or off: In your Budget page and in your Settings page. Click the "Settings" gear icon that shows up when you hover over a category to turn it on. You can tell that rollovers are turned on by the "cycle" icon next to the number in the "Remaining" column.
-
Turn Rollovers on in Budget
On your Budget page, click the "gear" icon that appears when you hover over a category in the web app and toggle rollovers on. Any month with a rollover will have a circular "cycle" icon next to the remaining number.
On mobile, the option is available from the 3 dots (...) that show in the top right page when viewing a category.
-
Turn Rollovers on in Settings
You can also accomplish this in the Categories Setting area, by clicking on any category.
How a rollover is calculated
The rollover amount is simply the remaining amount in a category. The remaining amounts are shown for all categories (with or without rollovers set). The difference when rollovers are turned on is that the remaining amount is included in the calculation for the budget in the next month.
Rollover (last month) + Planned (this month) - Actual (this month)
= Remaining Rollover (next month)
In this example, the rollover from last month was $-25 (meaning last month this category was over budget by $25), the planned budget was $100, and the actual amount spent was $50. Using the equation, you get:
-$25 (rollover from last month) + $100 (budget) - $50 (actual) = $25 remaining to rollover
Rollovers can continue on for many months, so each month will show the rollover amount from the month before it. The "cycle" icon in the green or red oval on the remaining amount indicates if a rollover amount was used in the calculation. Any months where rollovers aren't turned on (or categories that don't use rollovers at all) will not show this "cycle" icon.
Multiple rollovers
All expense categories are totaled and shown in a red bar with the actuals on the left and planned on the right.
When rollovers are turned on, the planned expenses on the right side of this red bar will include all the rollover amounts from the last month. You can see if the calculation includes rollovers when it has a "cycle" icon next to it similar to individual categories.
Starting balance on a rollover
If you want to start your rollover category with more than your current monthly budget, you can set a Starting Balance. This can be done on both web and mobile from the edit category screen.
Rollovers + Flex budgeting
While rollovers should always be turned on for non-monthly expenses, you can set any category to be treated as a rollover expense, regardless of whether the category is in the fixed, non-monthly, or flex bucket. You can also turn the rollover option on for the larger flex bucket itself.
Each bucket — and each category — will have a header showing the "budget," "actual," and "remaining" amounts. Rollovers work differently depending on the bucket:
- For the fixed and non-monthly buckets, the rollovers will affect the "remaining" amount on both the category and the high-level bucket.
- For your flex bucket, the rollovers will only affect the category-level "remaining" amount and do not affect the overall flex bucket amount. You can also turn the rollover option on for the flex bucket itself.
When rollovers are enabled, the remaining number is calculated from the actual amount spent during the month plus the total rolled over from the previous month.
Example rollover budget
Let's say that you have a "Gas & Electric" bill that is due every four months, and you pay $200 each time. That equals $50/month ($200/4). You'll set it up like this:
-
- Set the budget for this category to whatever the correct monthly amount is (select "Apply to all future months"). In this example, we'd set it to $50:
- Toggle on "Make this category a rollover fund"
- Set the "Starting Month" to go back to the first month when you started saving (i.e. if the "Gas & Electric" bill is due this month, you'd set the date to go back four months) -- you can skip this step and only use Step 4 if you'd like.
- Set the "Starting Balance" to be any amount that is already saved starting on that month (i.e. if you set this month to be the starting month and you have $100 saved from the last two months where you didn't pay the gas & electric bill, you can set this field to be $100) -- you can skip this step and only use Step 3 if you'd like.
- Set the budget for this category to whatever the correct monthly amount is (select "Apply to all future months"). In this example, we'd set it to $50:
This should allow the monthly amount ($50 in this example) to roll over for four months in a row, then when the time comes to pay it, your budget for "Gas & Electric" will be the monthly amount ($50) x 4 saved months = the whole cost of the water bill, or $200.
The "Gas & Electric" category budget will then look like this:
-
- Month one: Budget = $50, actual spent = $0, so the rollover amount = $50
- Month two: Budget = $50, actual spent = $0, rollover amount = $100 (month one rollover + month two rollover)
- Month three: Budget = $50, actual spent = $0, rollover amount = $150
- Month four: Budget = $50, actual spent = $0, rollover amount = $200
Then, at some point in month four, when the budgeted amount has hit $200 thanks to rollovers, you'd pay that bill, which would set the rollover budgeted amount back to $0, and the cycle would restart again the next month.