Budget lines and groups

Lines are the rows of your budget. Each line covers one or more categories and holds the money you plan to spend on them. Groups are headings that keep related lines together, such as Bills or Everyday.

Read the grid

Every line shows three amounts for the period you’re viewing:

Assigned: what you plan to spend. Click it to change it. See Assigning and rollover.
Activity: what happened in the line’s categories. Spending shows as a negative amount, and money coming back, such as a refund in the same category, adds to it.
Available: what’s left. It’s the money carried over from the last period, plus Assigned, plus Activity. Green means money is left, red means the line is overspent, and grey means exactly 0.

Under the line’s name you’ll see its categories and “Spent X of Y”, where Y is what the line had this period: its carried-over money plus Assigned. A line with a goal shows the goal’s status there instead. See Goals.

The Total row at the bottom adds up every line and says how many there are.

The budget grid with a Bills and an Everyday group, their lines with Assigned, Activity and Available amounts, one overspent line in red, row bars under each line name, and the Total row.

Badges next to a line’s name

override: this period uses a one-off amount instead of the line’s usual one.
carries deficit: the line uses Carry surplus and deficit, so overspending moves on to the next period.
archived: you’re looking at a past period, and the line has been archived since.

The totals at the top

Above the grid, four tiles sum up the period: Assigned, Spent, Available, and Overspent, which adds up every line that’s below 0 and says how many there are.

On a narrow screen, lines show as cards. Each card has Available at the top right and the Assigned amount at the bottom.

Add a line

Click Add line below the grid. To add it straight into a group, click + on the group’s row instead.
Enter a Name, for example “Groceries”.
If your budget has groups, pick a Group, or leave No group.
Under Categories, pick one or more categories.
Click Save.

The New line window with the name Eating out, the Everyday group selected, and the categories list open with Restaurant, fast-food and Bar, cafe checked and Groceries marked as taken by another line.

A few rules for categories:

Picking a category includes its subcategories. Pick Food & Drinks and the line covers Groceries, Restaurant, fast-food and every other subcategory under it.
A category can only be in one line. The list shows which line already has a category, and you can’t pick it for a second one. This applies to a whole branch too: if one line has Groceries, another can’t take all of Food & Drinks.
Spending in categories without a line shows under Spending outside your lines.

A new line starts in the current period. If you’re looking at a past period when you add it, it starts from that period instead, so you can budget spending you’ve already done.

Edit a line

Open the ⋯ menu (Line actions) at the end of the line and choose Edit line. You can change its Name, Group and Categories, then click Save.

A new name shows in every period, past ones included.
Category changes apply from the current period on. Past periods keep the categories the line had then, so their numbers don’t change.

Group your lines

Groups are headings with their own totals. They don’t change any amounts.

Click + (Add group) next to Line group at the top of the grid.
Enter a Group name, for example “Bills”.
Click Save.

To put lines in the group, edit each line and choose the Group, or drag them there in Manage layout.

Each group row shows the group’s Assigned, Activity and Available totals. Click the arrow on a group row to fold its lines away, or the arrow next to Line group to fold or unfold every group at once. Folded groups stay folded next time you open the budget in the same browser.

Rename or delete a group

Open the ⋯ menu (Group actions) on the group row, or right-click the row, and choose:

Edit group to rename it.
Delete group to remove it. You can only delete a group once none of its lines are active. Until then the option is turned off, with the hint “Move or archive its lines first”. Archived lines in the group become ungrouped.

Arrange lines and groups

Click Options at the top right of the budget.
Choose Manage layout.
Drag lines to reorder them, or into another group. Drag lines into Ungrouped to take them out of any group.
Drag a group by its header to move it with all its lines.
Click Save.

Archived lines aren’t listed and keep their place.

The Manage layout window with an Ungrouped section and the Bills, Everyday and Life groups, each listing its lines with drag handles.

Change how rows look

The Options menu has a Row bars setting. It’s saved in your browser, so it doesn’t change what other devices show.

Row bars picks the thin bar under each line’s name:

Spending bar: how much of the line’s money is spent. It turns red when the line is overspent.
Goal bar: how far along the line’s goal is. Lines without a goal, or with a snoozed one, show no bar.
Combined bar (the default): both bars.
Split bars: like Combined bar, but the spending bar is split into carried-over money and money assigned this period.
No bar.

Archive a line

Archive a line you no longer need but whose history you want to keep.

Open the ⋯ menu at the end of the line and choose Archive line.
Confirm with Archive line.

The line stops counting from the current period on. Past periods keep their numbers, and the line shows there with an archived badge. Its categories are free right away, so you can archive a “Food” line and create separate “Groceries” and “Eating out” lines in the same period.

Restore an archived line

Click Archived at the bottom of the grid. It shows how many lines are archived.
In Archived lines, click Restore next to the line.

A restored line comes back from the current period with the categories it had. In the periods it spent archived, it shows nothing assigned or spent. If another line has taken one of its categories in the meantime, restoring fails. Remove that category from the other line first.

Delete a line

Open the ⋯ menu at the end of the line and choose Delete line. What the window offers depends on how long the line has existed:

A line that started in the current period: its assigned amounts are deleted and its spending shows as outside your lines. Click Delete permanently.
A line that started in an earlier period: it’s removed from every period, past ones included. MoneyMatter suggests archiving it instead to keep its history, with an Archive line button. To delete it anyway, click Delete line.

To delete an archived line, click Archived at the bottom of the grid, then the trash icon next to the line, and confirm with Delete line. It’s removed from every period, past ones included.

Deleting can’t be undone.

Spending outside your lines

When the budget’s accounts have spending in categories no line covers, a bar appears below the grid: “Spending outside your lines: X in N categories”. Click it to see the amount per top-level category.

It’s a to-do list. For each category, either add it to an existing line, add a new line for it, or leave it if you don’t want to budget it.

Start budgeting
Assigning and rollover
The side panel: click a line to see its details.
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