About Transactional Categories

Transactional Categories are categories that go beyond holding a single budget amount representing the current balance for that category.  They allow entry and record keeping of each item added to the current balance, as a transaction with date and description that can be viewed later to provide greater details and control over the category amount in the budget.

In other words, rather than just have a single amount of $763 in your “Additional Income” budget category by February 25th, you can have a list showing the details behind this amount, each with the date and description such as:

$63          Private teaching                     Feb 7, 2008

$641        Part time Starbucks                Feb 16, 2008

$59          Weekend gardening job         Feb 25, 2008

And so on.

You still have your “Additional Income” budget  category showing a single amount that is the sum of all your transactions entered, automatically calculated and inserted into the budget field for you by the system, and you can still analyze the entire budget quickly and efficiently, but you also have the extra information at your finger tips should you want to dive deeper and find out the item details behind your current budget amount.

Transactional Categories are only relevant in the budget green (actual) column, currently there are two Transactional Categories in OOTD’s Power-Budget Edition, one for the catch-all Cash In (income) category and one for the catch-all Cash Out (expense) category.  Look for the little icon to the right of the green column category as a visual mark of a Transactional Category, and use it by simply clicking inside the amount field.

To maintain audit trail integrity, transactions, once entered, may not be deleted or modified, but you can correct mistakes, zero an existing balance amount (if needed at the start of a new month), or apply refunds and discounts at a later date by applying correction transactions with negative amounts.

When using the option to reset the green (actual) column for a new month period by copying the budget amounts from the grey column over to the green column, all existing Transactional Category details for the green column are deleted to facilitate a clean start for the new period.  You would normally generate your month end report before doing this if you want to save and keep your last month budget for historical analysis later.  The report saves only your current budget totals, but if you care to also save your transactional details, you can view them on the screen and use copy / paste to save the table of transactions information from the screen into a text file.  Make sure you do this before you reset the green column for the new month, which will clear all your transactions from the system.

As always, users feedback and comments are welcome so feel free to leave a comment below here as you start using These Transactional Categories and have anything to say about them or if you have a question you can send us an e-mail via the Contact menu option from your budgeting account log-in.

Happy budgeting,

Shony