Group your Envelopes together to see the bigger picture.
How do I group my Envelopes? How does it help?
It’s quite simple to group your Envelopes. When you name your Envelopes on the Add/Edit Envelopes page, use colons “:”–like Food: Eating Out and Food: Groceries. On the web your Budget allocation and Spending by Envelope Reports will group these together. You’ll see whether you’re on track in each Envelope and also how you’re doing with the whole Envelope Group.
Which Envelopes should I group together?
Well, that depends on what you want. If you have a lot of bills (cell phone, power, water, trash, cable, etc.) you might be getting a report that shows all of your bills separately, like this:
To see how much you spent on your bills together while still tracking each bill separately, name your Envelopes like this:
- Bills: Cell Phone
- Bills: Water
- Bills: Power
- Food: Groceries
- Food: Eating Out
You’ll get a cleaner simpler report that shows how much of your budget goes toward bills.
Another way we’ve seen people use Envelope groups is to track spending between different members of the a household. For example:
- His: Gasoline
- His: Fun Money
- Hers: Gasoline
- Hers: Fun Money
- Ours: Rent
- Ours: Groceries
This enables partners to see how much they’re spending on shared expenses and how much they’re each spending on separate expenses.
