Out of Pocket Budgets

A normal budget answers “how much of my limit is left?”. That is the wrong question for money you expect back, where the answer is eventually all of it. So an Out of Pocket budget answers a different one, and shows three figures instead of a bar: what you paid, what has come back, and what you are still owed.

Typical uses:

• A work trip your employer reimburses.
• Business expenses you claim back monthly.
• A holiday you booked for the family before anyone paid you.
• A deposit or repair you will be paid back for.

People used to build a fake annual budget for this, purely to keep the spending out of their monthly numbers. This is the real container for it.

1. Tap the + button and choose Out of Pocket Budget. It is the same + button you use to add anything else, so any screen will do.
2. Enter a Budget Name - who is paying you back is usually the useful one, such as “Work Expenses” or “Berlin Conference”.
3. Pick an icon so you can spot it in a list.
4. Optionally tick Associate transactions now to capture a date range as you go. See the next section.
5. Tap Create. With Associate transactions now ticked that button reads Next instead, because it takes you to the confirmation described below rather than saving anything yet.

That is the whole form. There is no amount, no rollover switch and no category linking, because none of the three means anything here. The budget appears in an Out of Pocket Budgets section on the Budgets tab, which stays hidden until you have at least one.

Associate transactions now creates a Timed Budget Redirect pointed at the budget you are making. Set a start and an end date - a name is optional - and everything you spend between those dates lands here instead of its usual budget, including transactions already on file.

A confirmation screen tells you how many existing transactions will be reassociated before anything is written. Read that number: it is the only warning you get that history is about to change.

You can point a redirect at an Out of Pocket budget at any time, not only at creation. This is the case redirects were built for - a work trip is a date range, not a category.

Two routes, and both are explicit:

• Pick it as the Budget on a transaction. Out of Pocket budgets sit in the same budget picker as everything else, sorted by name - on the add form, the edit form, a CSV import row and the bulk Change Budget action.
• Redirect a date range into it, as above.

Splitting interacts with it in one direction. If a purchase sitting in this budget is split so that part of it goes to another budget, only the part that stayed counts as fronted here.

Transfers and investment transactions never count toward it, wherever they are assigned.

Two ways, and both feed the same reimbursed figure on the card:

• Link a repayment to the exact expense. Open the incoming transaction, give it the Reimbursement or Refund category, and tap Link to Expense. Best when one payment covers one purchase. See Reimbursements & Refunds.
• Assign a lump sum to the budget. Give the incoming transaction the Reimbursement or Refund category and set its Budget to this container. That is the normal shape for an expense report paid as one amount covering a dozen purchases, where there is no single expense to link it to.

There is no progress bar, on the card or inside the budget. There is nothing for one to fill against.

Tap the card to open the transaction list. Its Details tab states the budget type and the outstanding balance, and carries the Edit, Archive and Delete actions. There is no period row, because an Out of Pocket budget has no period. Its figures cover everything ever assigned to it, including transactions dated before you created it - which is what makes a redirect over last year’s trip work.

This is the whole point of the container, so it is worth being exact:

• It stays out of your monthly budget totals. A work trip does not make it look like you overspent in March.
• It stays out of Reports - both the single-month view and the range view. Annual budget spending shows up in a range report; out-of-pocket spending appears in neither, because it is money you expect back rather than money you spent.
• The reimbursement is never counted as income. It reduces what the budget is owed and nothing else.

One thing it cannot do. A Goal Fund can move money out to a monthly budget, an annual budget or your WorryFree limit. An Out of Pocket budget is deliberately not one of those destinations: money fronted here is already coming back on its own, so topping it up from savings would count the same dollars twice.

Open the budget, switch to the Details tab, and use Archive or Delete.

Archiving keeps the budget and every transaction attached to it. It leaves the active list and collects under an Archived section below your Out of Pocket budgets, which starts closed. Nothing is lost in the move - unlike a monthly budget there is no rollover balance to clear and no categories to unlink.

To bring one back, open that section and tap the card. It opens the same modal a live budget does, and Restore sits in the Details tab in the slot Archive occupied. Edit is the one action an archived budget does not offer, so restore it first if you want to rename it.

An archived card shows the date it was archived where its balance used to be. The paid, reimbursed and owed figures are only worked out for active budgets, and printing $0.00 would read as settled when it may be nothing of the kind. Tap the card and the transactions are all still there.