Step by Step Guide To Create Your First Budget

Are you signed up and ready to get started? Great! Follow this step by step guide to create your first budget within Blue Cardinal.

TL;DR

The initial setup of your budget is a six step process.

1. Create an account
2. Create a budget
3. Link the account to the budget
4. Create budget category groups
5. Create budget categories
6. Add your transactions

The first five steps are only for initial setup. Once you are setup, your main budgeting activities would be adding transactions and adjusting planned amounts. The easiest way to add transactions would be via the budget transactions page.

If you want to learn more about the terminology and how each portion of the budget functions, see the getting started with blue cardinal guide.

Create an account

Accounts house all transactions. You likely have more than one account, with more than one financial institution, but let’s start with a simple scenario. One bank with a checking account and a savings account.

To setup the account, navigate to the accounts section and press “get started”. If you already have an account setup then you can skip this step. If you would like to add a new account, simply press the “actions” button, then select “create an account”. When prompted, fill in the necessary information, then press “create account”.

That’s it! Your first account is setup! Syncing external accounts will be implemented in the future. For now, all accounts are setup manually.

Next, try adding another account, or move on to creating a budget.

Create a budget

By this point you should have one or more accounts setup. You’ll see why that’s important in a moment. For the time being, navigate to the budgets section.

In the budgets section, you’ll see a “get started” button. If you don’t see this button, no worries, you can still create a budget by clicking the “actions” button in the top right corner, and then choosing “create a budget”. Once pressed, you will be prompted to enter information about your new budget. You can change any of this information later, for now, enter a suitable name for your first budget, then press “create budget”.

Once the budget is created, you will now see it in your list of budgets. Now you may be thinking, “why multiple budgets?”. Well, the reasons vary. Some like separate budgets for their side hustle(s), while others want to keep their business expenses separate from their personal expenses. Once family plans are implemented, a family of five will be able to individually login, create and share budgets. A great example of this would be parents sharing a single budget, while creating individual budgets for their teenage children. That way they can teach their children, while keeping an eye on all household budgets.

For this walk through, we’ll just stick with one budget.

Link account to budget

Now we have an account and have a budget, but they don’t know about each other. So, let’s introduce them to each other! To start, navigate to your new budget by selecting “budgets” from the top navigation menu, then selecting your budget that you created in the previous step. Once your budget is selected, select “linked accounts” from the left side navigation of the budget level menu.

Once you are on the link budgets page, select the actions button in the top right corner and choose “link account to budget”. Now select the account that you created in the previous step and press “link account”. That’s it! Now you’ve introduced the budget to the account.

This comes in handy when you are adding transactions from within a budget. Now that the budget knows about the account(s), new transactions will be added to the correct account, while still contributing towards this month’s budget.

Now that we have your budget talking with your account(s), let’s move on to creating budget category groups.

Create budget category groups

Category groups exist to group categories together. You can have as many category groups as you like, however for this example we’ll only create two: one for income and one for expenses.

In your budget, click the actions button and choose “create category group”. Let’s call this one “all income”, change the type to “income”, and then press “create”. Let’s create one more category group. We’ll call this second one, “all expenses”, make sure the type is set to “expense”, then press “create”.

Now you should have two category groups, one for income, and one for expenses. Next, we’ll create categories that reside within these two category groups.

Create budget categories

Categories are how you categorize your transactions. Now that we have a few category groups in place, it’s time to create a few categories.

Let’s start with income categories. From the top of your budget summary, click the “actions” button, and select “create category”. Let’s give this category the name of “Full Time Job”, an approximate amount that you bring in within a month, then select “all income” from the category groups selection. Press “create” when you are all set. Now you’ll see that you have one category group and one category within the income section.

Let’s do the same for the expense section. This time we’ll create two categories. From the top of your budget summary, click the “actions” button, and select “create category”. Let’s give this category the name “rent”, then add how much you pay a month for your rent. Likewise, if you own a home, this could be called “mortgage” instead of rent, but the premise is the same. Now, be sure to select the “all expenses” category group, and then press “create”. Create one more category named “food” under the “all expenses” category.

Now that we have a few categories in place, it’s time to add transactions to them.

Add transactions

There are three places in which you can add transactions within Blue Cardinal: the account transactions page, the budget summary and the budget transactions page. For this guide, we’ll focus on the latter two.

When you add transactions within Blue Cardinal, they are always associated with an account. You can also associate transactions with a budget category. Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense right now. Let’s take this one step at a time, starting with adding transactions via the budget summary page.

Adding a transaction within the budget summary page

When you create a transaction within the budget summary, that transaction will be automatically associated with an account and with your selected budget category.

To start, begin by navigating to the budget that you would like to add a transaction to. You can do this by navigating to your budgets section and then selecting a budget. Once selected, the budget summary page will appear. From here, click the “actions” button on the top right hand corner and then select “create transaction”.

Once the dialog is open, you will be able to select an account that you can add the transaction to, followed by entering the details of the transaction. The categories available will depend on whether the transaction type is “income” or “expense”. For now, let’s create an income transaction that represents a paycheck. Select the account that we created earlier, then change the transaction type to “income”. Now enter the details of a typical payday, including the amount, and the date of your last paycheck. At the bottom of this dialog, select the category in which you would like to categorize this transaction.

Once you have the transaction detail entered, take notice of the “create another” checkbox at the bottom. This is useful if you want to create more than one transaction while this dialog is open. For now, let’s leave it unchecked and press “create transaction”. Once the transaction is created, notice that your budget summary has also been updated!

Moving along. Let’s create a transaction for your rent or mortgage payment. Just like before, let’s click on the actions button in the top right corner and select “create transaction”. From here, select the account that you want to add the transaction to, and this time, select “expense” as the transaction type. Now enter all the details of the transaction, select the corresponding expense category, and press “create transaction”.

That’s it! Rinse and repeat for the rest of your transactions.

Adding a transaction within the budget transactions page

At some point, while you are adding transactions, you may wonder if you’ve already added a transaction or not. That’s where the budget transactions page comes in handy. To navigate to the budget transactions page, while in your budget summary, select the “transactions” menu from your left side navigation.

Here you can view your transactions in a list form for the current month. You can even search for transactions by merchant name. While on the topic of searching, there are two variants of searching by merchant name: fuzzy and non-fuzzy. Fuzzy search helps if you don’t quite remember the name of the merchant that you’re searching for, so it will “massage” the search term for less than exact names. For example, searching for “etrade” will return transactions with the merchant name of “E-trade”, “E-Trade”, “etrad”, and even “trade” (if you have transactions with those merchant names). Non-fuzzy search will always check for the exact wording within the merchant name. You can toggle between the two search modes by clicking on the column options menu, and toggling “fuzzy search”.

Okay, back to adding a transaction. The process for adding a transaction on the budget transactions page is similar to that of the summary page’s process. Simply click the “actions” button in the upper right corner and select “create transaction”. From here on, the process is exactly the same. Once the transaction is created, you’ll notice that the transactions list updates automatically.

A quick note here about adding transactions while the transactions list is filtered. The transaction search filters will remain in place even if you are adding transactions to the list. If you want to see all transactions, make sure to clear any search filters.

Linking transactions from the account transactions page

If you create a transaction within the account transactions page (not the budget transactions page), it will not be linked to a budget automatically. However, you can link the transaction to a budget category by clicking on the actions menu for a given transaction, and selecting “link to budget category”. For reference, you can see which transactions are already linked with a budget category via the “links” column of the transactions list. This list resides within the account transactions page.

Next Month

All the activity that we did today was for the current month. By default, the current month is selected when you are viewing the budget summary. If you navigate to a future or past month, you will not see the budget categories, category groups, nor the transactions that we created today. This is intentional as each month may be different from the rest.

Now you are probably wondering, “am I going to have to create new budget category groups and categories for each month?”. The short answer is… yes, for now. This leads us into the concept of budget templates which will be used to populate a given month’s budget structure.

The concept here is simple, create one or more templates to populate a month’s budget. Let’s consider how different your December’s budget structure may look than July’s . You will be able to create “holiday” templates or “summer” templates, and then use them to populate next month’s budget.

The budget template feature will be implemented within the next coming months. For now, each new month will have to be manually populated.

Wrap up

This was a step by step guide to getting started. If you would like to have a more general understanding of how to get started, see our getting started guide. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out at james.woodruff@blue-cardinal.io.