Annual Budgets

Travel might mean nothing for nine months and then a large trip in July. Gifts cluster around birthdays and the holidays. Car maintenance arrives when something breaks. For these, the goal is the yearly total rather than a flat monthly spend.

Common candidates:

• Travel and holidays.
• Gifts.
• Car maintenance and home repairs.
• Professional development.
• Medical and dental costs.

The test is simple: if you regularly blow the monthly limit one month and barely touch it the next, that category belongs on annual.

1. Tap the + button and choose Budget. The + is on every screen, so any of them will do. If you have no annual budgets yet there is a second route: the Add Annual Budget button in the empty Annual Budgets section on the Budgets tab, which opens the same form with the type already set.
2. Enter a Budget Name and choose an icon.
3. Set the Budget Type to Annual.
4. Enter the yearly limit you want to stay under.
5. Link the categories whose spending should count toward it.

The budget activates immediately and starts counting every qualifying transaction from here on. Transactions already on file are a separate, explicit step: if any of the categories you linked hold spending that is not attached to a budget yet, Cadence Money stops on a Link Existing Transactions? screen, tells you how many it found, and waits. Link & Save pulls them in, Save Without Linking creates the budget and leaves them alone, and Go Back returns you to the form.

Nothing already assigned to another budget is touched, so linking a category cannot quietly empty a budget you built earlier. You can change the name, the limit and the categories later without losing what you have tracked.

Annual budgets show year-to-date progress rather than monthly progress. The bar fills based on how much of the yearly limit you have used, and the budget trend chart adapts to the full year. Glance at it in October and you can see whether you are on pace, even if one month looked unusually high.

On the Budgets tab, annual and monthly budgets sit in their own lists and use the same colour coding. Drag them into whatever order suits you - many people put the annual ones at the bottom, since they need less frequent attention.

On the Cash Flow card, the Yearly Budgets tile is measured against the whole year no matter which period you have selected, with what you spent from them this month beside its label. Only that spending counts toward the month, so a big yearly purchase makes that month heavier. See Plan Overview.

Adjust the yearly limit whenever you like. Spending already counted stays counted and the bar simply recalculates. Raise the limit and your remaining amount goes up. Lower it below what you have already spent and the budget shows as over, with a red bar. That is intentional: it is a real fact about the year, and you can decide whether to rein spending in or accept it.

Adding or removing categories mid-year is safe too. Adding one takes the same Link Existing Transactions? step as creating the budget did: choose Link & Save and the category’s existing transactions come with it, so the total reflects the year rather than only the days since you changed it. Choose Save Without Linking and the category counts from now on only. Either way, transactions already sitting in another budget stay where they are.

When a year’s budget is done with, archive it rather than deleting it. Tap the budget card, switch to the Details tab and choose Archive. The budget and its spending are kept; it just leaves the active list and collects under an Archived section at the bottom of the Annual Budgets list.

That section starts closed. Open it and an archived budget still wears its ordinary card and opens the ordinary modal - tap it and Restore is in the Details tab, where Archive used to be. Edit is withheld while a budget is archived, so restore it before changing anything.

Archiving unlinks the budget’s categories, so check those if you bring it back. See Budgets.

If a whole stretch of spending belongs to an annual budget - a two-week holiday, a conference - you do not have to recategorise it afterwards. A Timed Budget Redirect sends everything in a date range into an annual budget automatically. See Timed Budget Redirects.