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. Open the Budgets tab of the Budget page and tap Add Budget.
2. Give it a 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 for the current calendar year, including ones already on file. 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 Annual Budgets tile is measured against the whole year no matter which period you have selected. See Budget 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. A category you add pulls in its existing transactions for the current year retroactively, so the total reflects the whole year rather than only the days since you changed it.

When a year’s budget is done with, open it for editing and choose Archive rather than deleting. 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, with a restore button.

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.