Quite often we are asked the question how can I still have remaining budget and overspend at the same time? To explain that we first need to understand what is overspend.
There are two types of overspend:
Where your Expenditure is greater than your BudgetYou have untagged items
Expenditure greater than Budget
To get the most out of Money Dashboard you need to set a budget for each of your Tag Groups (eg House, Transport & Lifestyle) and tag all your transactions. Your total budget is the sum of budgets for each tag group.
You will have overspend when:
your Total Spend is greater than your Total Budgetyou spend over your budget in one or more of your tag groups
If you have any budget left in any of your other tag groups then you will have remaining budget. Now you have Overspend and Remaining at the same time.
Example
Looking at the table below. I have set a budget for each of the Tag Groups Household, Lifestyle, Transport and Cash. The Total budget is £2,750, I have spent £2,165 so I have remaining budget of £585 BUT I have an overspend of £200. That's because for my Household Tag Group I have set a budget of £500 but I have spent £700.
Untagged Items
To get the most out of Money Dashboard you need to tag your transactions eg Shopping from Sainsburys will be tagged as Groceries, Petrol from Shell will be tagged as Fuel etc. If however, you have a number of transactions which have not been categorised or tagged, these transactions will be categorised as Untagged. The total of those untagged items is calculated as Overspend.
Example
Looking at the table below. I have 3 transactions, 2 transactions have been tagged and 1 which is untagged. The expenditure of the items which have been tagged will be allocated to the total expenditure for the Tag Group (Household and Travel), the 3rd item (John Lewis) has not been tagged and so it will be included as part of the total overspend.
Future Plans
Hopefully that is now a bit clearer, but hopefully this will become even clearer in the future. At the moment we are only displaying overspend at the Tag Group level (eg Household, Lifestyle etc) but we are planning to include a new feature which will enable you to see overspend at the Tag level (eg Groceries, Fuel etc). Please keep an eye on our forum where we will be asking for your feedback on this.
