Personal Finance Budget Base - How to calculate monthly expenses

[Ashley_Jackson]

Hello again!  I am developing a base for use in tracking personal financial budgets.  If it works well, we will probably adapt it for use with our non-profit as well.  Here's the general structure:

Tables

1. Categories (I call them buckets)
2. Transactions
3. Designations

Transactions are added as money is spent or earned.  Each transaction can be assigned to one or multiple categories via the designations join table.

Each category is assigned a budget.  I want to total all designations by bucket broken down by month WITHOUT having to change filters on a rollup field.  Is this possible?

TIA!

[jasonsamuels]

I'd be interested in checking this out. I developed this household budget Google Sheet which maybe someday I'll find the time to rebuild on Airtable. You're welcome to steal from it, but it takes a very different approach of using transaction tables which correspond to the CSV export formats offered by our financial institutions. Then the analysis tabs pull it together using formulas that are structured to work with each of those outputs.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

My workaround for this involves a table where each record represents a month-year, and I populate that with an automation

Can't say for sure how it'd be set up within your table, but imagine a base that only had the "Transactions" and "Month-Year" table, and they're linked

I'd have a formula field that outputs the transaction record's month-year value (e.g. 01 2022), and an automation that would paste that value into the linked field.  The "Month-Year" table would have a rollup and display the monthly breakdown

I'd be very interested in another way to do this as well

[pressGO_design]

There are two possible solutions here. For the personal budget, I think I’d go with Jeremy Oglesby’s formula field in your Categories/Buckets table to total this month’s transactions, which will give you a snapshot of how well (or not so well) you’re doing this month based on how much you’ve budgeted for that bucket this month. 

I’m not sure how helpful that will be for the non-profit, though…. But it might be a place to start?