Build a monthly budget from the spending you actually have

A useful budget is not a second ledger. It is a plan laid beside the ledger you already have: a target for this month, the spending recorded against it, and an explicit choice about what—if anything—travels into next month.

That is how GlidePath’s Budgets page works. Saving a plan does not rewrite an imported transaction, recategorize a purchase, or change the older timeless budget baseline. It adds a month-specific plan in your local data folder.

What you’ll learn

Which transactions become budget actuals—and which ones deliberately do not
How to start with three categories instead of budgeting everything at once
The difference between Target, Actual, Available, Remaining, and Pace
What Carry this month’s remainder really does, including after an overage
How to copy a saved plan without silently replacing one you already made

Before you start

Bring in at least one set of transactions and categorize the spending you want to plan. Budgets builds its rows from spending categories already present in your local ledger. On an empty ledger, the page correctly stops at Bring in transactions before setting category targets and points to Import.

If most of the month is still Uncategorized, finish the first categorization pass first. Otherwise the page can show that money as spending without giving it the category target you meant to compare it with.

Step 1 — Open the month you mean to plan

Open Budgets from Money in the top navigation. The command bar appears before the totals and rows because the selected month controls every figure below it.

Use the left and right arrows for adjacent months, or choose a month under Plan month and click Open month. Past months read through their last day. The current month reads through today. A future month has no actuals or pace yet, and its carry-in stays blank until the month arrives—the app will not treat an unfinished prior month as settled.

Try it: Open /Budgets ↗ (works when the desktop app is running on this computer—just browsing? See the demo)

Step 2 — Know what counts as an actual

GlidePath counts a row in a budget actual only when all of these are true:

It falls inside the selected month
It is categorized as spending, not income
Its amount is an outflow
It is not a transfer or credit-card-payment row
It is not marked Exclude this row from budgets and reports

That boundary prevents moving money between your own accounts from looking like spending twice, and it keeps an intentionally excluded row out of both the category actual and the total.

Every category name in the table is a link. Open it to see the matching Transactions view bounded to the first and last day of this month. That is the evidence path when an actual looks surprising: inspect the rows before changing the target.

Step 3 — Give three categories a target

You do not need to assign a target to every category. The page itself recommends starting with three flexible or variable areas where seeing the pace could change a decision.

For each one:

Choose a Group: Fixed, Flexible, Variable, or Other
Enter a non-negative Target
Optionally open Plan note and record the intent behind the number
Leave Carry this month’s remainder off for now unless you want both underspending and overspending to affect the next consecutive saved month

The 6-mo avg under the category name is context, not a suggested target. It is the prior six calendar months of matching spending divided by six—even if some of those months had no spending. Your target remains the number you type.

Categories with neither a positive target nor a carry-in stay visible. Their spending is not hidden; the statement reports it under Without targets.

Step 4 — Save the month-specific plan

Use the save bar at the bottom of the page to save the plan. GlidePath writes the month, category, group, target, rollover choice, and note to budget-months.csv in your local data folder.

If you upgraded from an older version and the page says your timeless targets are being used as the starting baseline, the first save creates this new month file. It leaves category-budgets.csv byte-for-byte untouched.

Saving the plan also leaves imported rows alone. A target is a comparison layer, never an edit to history.

Step 5 — Read the statement in the right order

Once at least one category has a target, the statement at the top gives the month in five different views:

Planned — the sum of this month’s category targets
Available — targets plus any carry-in earned by prior consecutive saved months
Actual — qualifying spending in the categories this plan tracks (a target above zero, or a carry-in)
Remaining — Available minus Actual
Without targets — qualifying spending in every other category

Actual and Without targets are separate buckets, not a total and its breakdown. Spending in a category with neither a positive target nor a carry-in does not raise Actual—it appears under Without targets instead. Together, the two buckets cover all qualifying spending included in this view.

Inside the table, Pace appears only for tracked categories in the current month. It extends spending so far across the number of days in the month. It is a straight-line run rate, not a forecast that knows payday timing, a vacation, or a bill due on the 28th.

Use Analyze flexible spending when you want history and movement rather than plan entry. That opens Discretionary; Budgets remains the place that owns month-specific targets, groups, notes, and rollover rules.

Step 6 — Use rollover deliberately

Carry this month’s remainder carries the full result, not just unused money:

next carry-in = this target + this carry-in − this actual

So an underspent category can add room next month, while an overspent category carries a negative amount that reduces next month’s available total. That is intentional: the checkbox means “let this month affect the next one,” not “carry only the good news.”

Three boundaries matter:

Both months need saved month-specific rows. A timeless legacy baseline alone is not a saved source month.
The months must be consecutive. A missing month breaks the chain instead of carrying an old remainder across the gap.
Future-month carry stays blank until the month arrives.

If you want the same structure next month, open that month and use the prior-month copy action. The copy brings over targets, groups, rollover choices, and notes—not actual spending. If the destination already has a saved plan, the page requires Replace this saved month before it will overwrite that plan.

What just happened

You created a plan that can be audited in both directions: from the target down to the exact transaction rows, and from a carry-in back to the consecutive saved month that earned it. Your ledger stayed intact.

That distinction is the whole point. When an actual is wrong, fix the transaction or category. When the plan is wrong, change the target. Do not make one pretend to be the other.

Common pitfalls

Budgeting before categorizing. Uncategorized spending cannot land against the target you have in mind.
Treating Pace as a promise. It is current spending divided by days elapsed and extended across the month; uneven bills can make it noisy.
Turning rollover on casually. An overage travels forward as a negative carry-in.
Expecting Copy to bring actuals. It copies only the plan fields.
Looking for income or transfers in the rows. Budgets is a spending plan; income, transfer-like rows, and excluded rows are deliberately out.
Editing from a partner session. A signed-in partner can inspect the actuals available to that login, but the household plan is read-only; the license holder owns the targets.