Budget vs actual report

The Budget vs actual report puts your monthly assignments next to your monthly activity for every category. It's the report that tells you whether your envelopes are realistic — over time, do you spend roughly what you assign, or are you consistently off in one direction?

The math

For every category, for every month in the window, the report computes:

• Assigned — what the Budget page shows as Assigned for that month
• Spent — absolute value of negative activity in that category, that month
• Variance — Assigned minus Spent (positive = underspent / leftover; negative = overspent)

The chart shows paired bars per month per category. The table shows the same numbers in rows.

Windows

• Last 3 months, last 6 months, last 12 months, year to date, custom.

A custom range with start and end months is supported; longer ranges work but the chart gets dense past 24 months.

Grouping

• Top 10 by spend — most categories don't matter; this picks the ones that do.
• One category — drill into a single line over time.
• By group — one bar pair per category group, summing the categories within.

What it's good for

• Spotting envelopes you under-assign to. Groceries with consistent red variance every month means $400/month isn't enough; you actually need $475 and you've been borrowing from somewhere else to cover it.
• Spotting envelopes you over-assign to. Subscriptions with consistent green variance means you're hoarding cash in a category that doesn't need it. Move it to something that does.
• Validating goal targets. A Reach a target by a date goal that's consistently underspent suggests the goal is conservative and the cash isn't being used; consider raising the target or reducing the monthly contribution.

What it's not

• Not a forecast. This is historical. For forward-looking projections see Cashflow projection.
• Not a per-payee view. Category-level only.

How variance interacts with carry-over

A category with $50 underspent in March doesn't disappear — it carries over to April's starting balance. The Budget vs actual report shows March variance as +$50; it does not adjust April's Assigned to compensate. April stands on its own.

This means a category with Refill up to a balance goals will often show variance every month even when it's behaving correctly — the goal does the rebalancing, not the Assigned cell.

Color coding

• Green — underspent (you assigned more than you spent)
• Red — overspent (you spent more than you assigned)
• Gray — exactly on target, or no spend / no assignment

The red/green palette comes from the theme tokens; flipping the theme adjusts both.

Drill-in

Click any month/category cell to jump to the register filtered to that category and month. Quickest way to investigate "why did Dining out go $80 over in November?"

A common pattern worth fixing

Categories that show one month deep red, next month deep green, next month deep red again. That's not a budgeting problem — that's an inconsistent assignment process. Either Auto-assign isn't being used or it's being overridden differently each month. See Auto-assign strategies for a steady-state workflow.