OOTD’s Money Bucket Accounts – Info page
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As important as budgeting is, one aspect of cash management that budgeting was not designed for is the management of cash amounts set aside for designated purposes where date sensitive cash out and cash in transactions along with current balances need to be tracked. This kind of management is very useful for savings or designated expenditure amounts.
OOTD’s Money Bucket Accounts are virtual accounts that act just like any bank cash account and that you have total control over. You can set them up with any opening amount and then apply as many Cash In (deposit) or Cash Out (withdrawal) transactions as you want, to reflect how the funds in the account are being depleted or replenished.
Once you have a practical need for one, you begin to appreciate the organizational power of this feature along side your budgeting. Say you and your partner decide to designate a given sum of cash for home improvements, or your band members for musical equipment, no need to physically take cash out and place it somewhere jointly, just open a Money Bucket Account with the designated sum as the opening amount. Then record a Cash Out transaction each time anyone spent any amount related to this account, specifying the amount, by whom, and for what, date stamping is done automatically for you. You have total control with transaction dates to the last penny spent.
Another classic example is if say you borrowed $1,000 from your uncle and promised to pay back as much as you can every month. An unpleasant situation at best if you did not keep your notes properly. Open another OOTD Money Bucket Account with the amount borrowed, then record each payment. No sweat, no problems and no notes that you risk not finding one day.
To access your Money Bucket Accounts once logged into your OOTD budget account, click the link from the functional links to the right of your budget columns. From the “My Money Bucket Accounts” page you can view your accounts, delete existing accounts or create new ones to a maximum of five accounts.
Money Bucket Accounts
Two functional links are available for each displayed account, the Details link is used to manage transactions for the account, and the Delete link to delete the account.
MB Account Details
From the Details page new transactions may be recorded but not removed or modified, so don’t rush your entry typing, pay attention to the correct amount and description text, think about what’s important to be recorded in the description. Cash In and Cash Out transactions are displayed with different colors for visual clarity. When an account is being deleted, so are all its related transactions.
As with any transaction based accounting system, to maintain the integrity of the system, correction are done via correction transactions, so if you recorded by mistake a Cash Out transaction for $15 and realized that it had to be for $10, you can correct this by entering another Cash In correction transaction for $5. It’s a good idea to always label such correction transactions with the word Correction in the description field.
Happy budgeting and now accounting too.
Shony
