I thought I got the idea of pots but once I used them my way, it didn’t work out.
My idea was to create a pot for e.g. ‘house holding bills’, then map my direct debits for electricity, gas etc to that very pot. I hoped I will then have a separate record that shows me the summary of costs for house holding bills deducted from my account over the time.
My assumption was that even when a pot doesn’t have any money in it, the money is taken from the main account but the deduction still listed as part of the pot. To my surprise, the transaction history in my pot is empty though.
Does that mean that a pot only records deductions when it was loaded with enough money?
Yeah you need the balance in the pot for the transaction to appear in the feed for that pot. If the pot balance won’t cover a transaction, it will be taken from your main balance instead. If you go to the ‘manage’ tab for a pot it should show you the amount that is scheduled to come out of that pot each month. So most people set up a pot transfer per month to more than cover it (or they use the salary sorter).
If it showed the deduction from the Pot when it in fact came from the main balance, then that would not be accurate. A bank account cannot lie about what has happened to the money in it.
Thank you very much for your replies, that makes it clear.
Is there any other way to achieve what I want to do?
I am less interested in a ‘pot’ to organise a preplanned budget, but more in reporting, how much money was spent in a specific category…
Sounds like what you want is a subaccount as an accountant might understand or implement it. Unfortunately that’s not what pots are.
I remember a thread a while back where someone wanted the ability to make a large purchase and then ‘pay themselves back’ over a period of time - eg spend £1200 then account for it over a year at £100. They wanted a pot that could do this, ie go negative then be refilled. The forum laughed them out of the room, sadly.
Similarly, if you have a regular payment that fluctuates - but you know the average funding it will need - pots can’t help you, because in ‘high spend’ periods the pot would need to go negative.
Hi Lewis, yes, Trends sounds like the feature I am looking for. I was considering the advanced account for the spreadsheet option, but as much as I like the ability to export data, I really just want to have an overview within the app - and not some extra accounting effort to do myself.
Cross fingers that the Trends are soon out for everyone and allow a flexible grouping of stuff (e.g. everything I consider a house holding expense …)