Resetting and starting a new budgeting period

.

This page contains information about resetting and starting a new budgeting period in your OOTD online budgeting.

OOTD budgeting main page has two budgeting columns, the grey on the left is your master budget, the plan you want to live by with amounts budgeted for your budgeting period.  Your budgeting period is normally the same as your pay period which is commonly a month.  The green column on the right is where you track your actual amounts as you go along for each period.  While your master budget column on the left is there to stay as periods pass by, you want to clear the green column at the end of each period in order to start tracking your expenses and income for the next period.

Resetting and starting a new period normally at the end of the month, means taking two simple actions:

• Saving the period ended by generating the end of period report.
• Resetting the green column for the new period.

Both actions are highly automated in OOTD budgeting.  You generate the report by clicking the link to the right of the green column, then after you verified that the report arrived safely in your e-mail, you can click the other link for resetting the green column, but there is one more setting that you can do before clicking this link to give you exactly what you want on the green column with zero manual work, and you do this only once.

Notice the small icons between the two columns these signify and allow you to set whether the category amount will be copied over from the column on the left to the column on the right or whether the amount on the right (green column) will just get reset to zero.  This can be very handy when you consider that while we want to basically zero out all the amounts on the green column to start a new tracking period, there are exceptions where we know that some amounts like salary, mortgage,  rent, insurance usually stay unchanged from month to month and as such we just want to copy these over from the master budget rather then zero them out and then manually enter the same amounts month after month.

You can set these tiny icons between the columns to specify which category gets zeroed out and which gets copied over by clicking those tiny icon to toggle from one state to the other.  You can do this for all the categories once only and save the setting with your master budget column.  Simply set all the icons as you want them and then click the Save button below the master budget column on the left.  Then when you click the reset link to the right of the green column, you can watch how your green column gets reset for the new period just the way you want it.

One last note regarding resetting and starting a new period is to do with the Money Tree Visualization feature.  As soon as you have one or more closed periods in your budget, you can take advantage of the Money Tree Visualization feature by clicking the Money Tree link and viewing summary information from your closed periods with pictorial representation, a great way to see how you are doing at a glance and stay motivated too.

If you have any questions or comments about this page, feel free to leave your comment down below or in the Users Billboard from the footer of any OOTD Budgeting page.

Happy budgeting,

Shony