Budgets

The Budgets screen lets you set a monthly spending cap on a category and keep an eye, over the course of the month, on how much you have spent against that cap. For example: "this month I don't want to go over €300 on Eating out" or "€150 max on Leisure". Cuéntamo adds up your real expenses in that category and shows a progress bar with a traffic light (green, amber, red) so you can tell at a glance whether you have plenty of room, whether you are getting close to the limit, or whether you have already gone over.

Budgets are always monthly and always about spending (you don't budget income). Each budget is tied to one category, and the same amount applies to every month: you don't have to recreate them each month, the cap is reused and the counter resets to zero when a new month begins.

The month selector

At the top right you choose which month you are looking at. You always start on the current month. Use the ‹ and › arrows to move back or forward one month; you can also click the month name to open a calendar and jump straight to any month, changing the year with its arrows.

You cannot move into future months: the › arrow is disabled on the current month and upcoming months appear greyed out in the calendar (a budget is "spent" through real transactions, and those don't exist yet). If you have wandered off to a past month, a "Today" link brings you back to the current one. Changing the month only changes what you see as spent; the budget itself (the cap, the threshold, the category) is the same across every month.

Creating a budget

Click "+ New budget" at the top right (or, if you don't have any yet, the big "Create budget" button in the middle of the screen). A form opens with these fields:

• Category. The expense category you want to cap. Only expense categories are offered (income ones don't appear) and only those that don't already have a budget (see below).
• Monthly amount. The cap in euros that you don't want to exceed each month. It must be a number greater than 0.
• Alert threshold. A slider from 10% to 100% (80% by default). It sets the percentage of the budget at which you want the traffic light to turn amber ("near the limit"). With 80%, as soon as you spend €240 of a €300 cap the budget goes amber.
• Scope. Only shown if you have the freelance module enabled. It decides whether the cap counts Personal spending, Freelance spending, or Both. More on this below.
• Active. A checkbox to keep the budget running or leave it paused. It is ticked when you create it.

Once saved, the budget appears in the list with its progress bar already calculated for the month you are viewing.

One category, one budget

Each category can have at most one active budget. That is why, when you create a new one, the category dropdown hides the ones that are already budgeted: this way you don't end up with two different caps fighting over the same category. If you want to change the cap of a category that already has a budget, edit it instead of creating another.

If you need to budget a category again after having paused it, reactivate it (it reclaims its slot) or delete it and create a new one. To group several expenses under a single cap, the way to go is concept classification: bring those expenses into a single category and budget that one.

How spending is calculated

The "spent" figure of each budget is the sum of your real expense transactions in that category within the selected month. Specifically, Cuéntamo adds up the transactions that meet all of the following:

• They are of expense type (income does not subtract from the budget).
• They are confirmed (real), not forecast. A future expense generated by a recurring template does not consume budget until it is confirmed as real.
• They belong to the budget's category.
• They fall within the month you are viewing (from the 1st to the last day).
• They match the budget's scope (personal, freelance or both).

The amount is used as an absolute value, so it doesn't matter how the expense is signed. Since only real transactions count, the figure you see is "what you have actually spent", not an estimate. If you want to project spending through to the end of the month, that reading is in the Forecast.

The progress bar and the traffic light

Each budget shows a progress bar that fills up according to the percentage spent, plus a numeric percentage (it can go over 100% if you have overspent, although the bar stops visually at 100%). The colour of the bar and the status label follow a traffic light:

• Green — "OK": you are below your alert threshold. All good.
• Amber — "Near the limit": you have reached or passed the alert threshold (80% by default) but not yet 100%. It is the "watch out, it's running out" warning.
• Red — "Limit exceeded": you have reached 100% or more. You have gone over the cap.

Next to the bar you see three figures: Spent (what you have used), Budget (the cap) and Remaining (what is left). The remaining amount appears in green while you still have room and in red with a minus sign when you have gone over (telling you how much you overspent).

Personal / freelance scope (freelance module)

If you have the freelance module active, each budget carries a scope that decides which spending counts against the cap:

• Personal: only adds up personal expenses in the category.
• Freelance: only adds up expenses from your self-employed activity.
• Both: adds up both personal and freelance together.

This lets you, for example, set a €200 cap on Work materials just for the freelance side, without mixing it with personal spending. In the list, budgets with a scope other than "Personal" show a label pointing it out. If you don't use the freelance module, you won't see this field and all your budgets are, quite simply, personal.

The budget list

On wide screens budgets are shown in a table with columns: category (with its icon and colour), progress (bar + percentage), spent, budget, remaining, status and —if you have freelance— scope. On narrow screens (or side panels) it automatically switches to stacked cards, with the same information laid out vertically.

When you click a row or card, Cuéntamo takes you to the transactions list already filtered by that category and month (real transactions only), so you can see at a glance which specific expenses consumed the budget. It is the quick way to answer "where did it go?".

Pause, edit and delete

To the right of each budget (or at the foot of each card) you have three actions:

• Pause / Activate. The pause/play icon disables or re-enables the budget without deleting it. A paused budget is no longer tracked (and frees up its category so you can budget it differently).
• Edit. Opens the same form to change the amount, the threshold, the scope or the status. The category of an existing budget can be reassigned among the ones that are free.
• Delete. Removes the budget (it asks for confirmation). Only the cap is deleted; your transactions are untouched: the spending stays recorded, you simply stop tracking it with a budget.

Something to keep in mind: the list shows active budgets. When you pause one, it stops appearing in the list. To track that category again, create a budget for it once more (the category is free as soon as the previous one is paused).

Budgets, goals and analysis

The budget is the tool for short-term spending limits (month by month, per category). It pairs with two others:

• Savings goals look at the other side: how much you want to accumulate for a target and at what pace, rather than how much you want to spend.
• The monthly table in Analysis gives you the historical picture of how much you have spent per category month by month; it is useful for setting a realistic cap before creating the budget.

A good starting point: check in Analysis what you usually spend in a category, set a cap a little below that, and let the traffic light warn you during the month.