Budgeting expenses with Alka

No matter your financial situation, budgeting is crucial for staying within your means––helping you avoid over-spending and, on the contrary, actually saving towards any goal you might have in the future.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can actually create a budget inside Alka.

Start by creating all your budget categories as Income & Expense Accounts nested under Expenses (ie. Expenses/Food). In this example, we are using “Budgeted Expenses”, “Food”, “Rent” and “Utilities”.

The next step is to create a new transaction with the Main Account set to “Budgeted Expenses” and the total amount of your budget.

Once that is done, trigger the Omnibar (

+

) and search for “Split transaction” and specify the number of splits your transaction should have. Since we only have 3 other accounts besides “Budgeted Expenses”, that will be the number of splits for the example.

Open your transactions details once finished and you should have something similar to this:

In here, change your postings categories from “Uncategorized” to each one of your budget categories and then specify the budget amount for each with a negative number. You should have something like this:

Next time you receive a transaction that should go into any of your budget categories, simply categorize your transaction as so and you should start noticing a decrease in your monthly budget inside your Chart of Accounts.