Hi All. I read through the following post and still feel like I need some help.
I have a personal cell phone and bill. My company reimburses me for this phone through my paycheck once a month with a flat rate. I have a line item in my budget for this item as “income”.
So in the savings budget I have a budgeted amount of $50 shown as income and once the paycheck is deposited in my account I show an actual of $50. The part that is confusing me is that when I go to transfer between this income line item to my cell phone expense the “available” column goes negative which makes sense, but I feel like this isn’t what I want.
I have also tried showing the paycheck reimbursement as a transfer, with a budget of $50. It looks like tiller treats transfers as expenses though because once the paycheck hits my account with $50, the actual column in the transfer shows as a -$50 and the amount available shows $100. This doesn’t feel right either.
Any thoughts on how best to handle this. One option is that I could continue to use the “transfer” type and just show the budget as -$50, but I don’t really like this either.
You probably need to use something like the Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator to include transactions from your paycheck that you can then categorize. If it shows up as a deduction on your paycheck, you can then put it in the category of your choosing.
If you are including the $50 reimbursement in your monthly income budget, there is no need to transfer savings from your income category to the expense category. The expense is still coming out of your budget, which has been increased accordingly. I have a similar situation with my credit card which gives a monthly Uber Eats stipend. I categorize the stipend as additional budgeted income and increase my Eating Out budget to match.
Why not just budget the net amount you pay for your cell phone (actual less reimbursed) and when you get your paycheck just categorize the reimbursement as a negative expense?