r/actualbudgeting

Is there any way to ensure that the date on the receiving account matches the outgoing account?

I understand for those that use banksync that the 'transfer out' date doesn't always match the 'transfer in', and that can cause problems with importing. That's great. I also saw that this was a feature request which benefits the 'bank sync-ers'

BUT!! I use manual input (ex-ynabber with no access to banksync for years) and will continue to do so. I find that the physical task of entering transactions keeps me on track.

I don't always get my transfers entered for a couple of days and have found when I change the date on the outgoing account to reflect the actual transfer date, the receiving date stays as the input date. This is causing my account balances to be out of sync, especially for EOM.

Any help is appreciated.

This is sad really. People are creating all sorts of apps in a span of a day with Claude and codex but we still don’t have an app for this brilliant tracker. No throwing shade to the developers, I been using this for years and I appreciate all the hard work and time put into this.

I get paid monthly on the 25th, or the Friday before if it's the weekend. In my mind, this has how I've thought about my money so far - I get paid, pay my rent, put money aside for bills, and start this "period" from now until my next payday. Actual Budget understandably shows my budget in a month view, which is throwing me off. For example, I pay my rent as soon as I get paid, but I pay my electricity on the 12th. To Actual, this is the following month, but to me this is the same billing period. Is it possible/sensible to work like this within Actual?

When I select an on-budget account, click the lock icon, enter the reconciliation amount, and press Reconcile, the reconciliation completes successfully. I see the green "All reconciled!" message with a checkmark, and the transactions in the ledger are marked with green checkmarks. At that point, the "Lock transactions" button appears next to "All reconciled!". However, after I click "Lock transactions", the button disappears, but the transactions remain marked only with green checkmarks. They are not converted to the green lock icon as they have been in the past, and they do not behave as locked reconciled transactions. For example, they cannot be hidden using the "Hide reconciled transactions" option.

This issue appears to affect only one of my on-budget accounts. In my other on-budget account, the locking process works as expected. Within the affected account, older reconciled transactions are still displayed with the green lock icon and can be hidden normally. The problem only affects the transactions from my most recent statement, which cannot be locked even though the reconciliation completes successfully.

Can anyone help me resolve this? I posted on the Discord this morning, but haven't gotten a reply.

I have a category that template doesn't work in, I have #template 1000 appied to it, but when i set budget template all works exepct for that, i tried making a new dummy category and apply the budget after setting budget back to 0 an it works for the new one.

EDIT: It seems to be a repeatable bug, after using the UI feature to set the templates, the notes template doesn't work anymore

I love tinkering with my reports, but one thing I cannot decide on is if I consider money going out from my Investing category (not Roth IRA category though) spending or savings. Lots of my charts look very red because I invest ~20% of my income each month which looks like overspending, but in reality isn't technically overspending?

Just curious how others handle investment categories when using summary cards, custom reports that are supposed to talk about needs/wants spending, and formula queries that utilize them as well.

All of my custom themes have been updated to take advantage of the two new color variables coming in 26.7.0 that add a color highlight to the bold on the sidebar and transaction tables when transactions are imported/sync'd. In case you want to change them, they are:

--color-tableTextItemAdded
--color-sidebarItemTextUpdated

These colors will be invisible in native themes.

I'm stuck on how to get started. It feels like a bit of chicken/egg situation. I added all of my account with their current balances, but it assigns them as income, so I have to place those balances in a category, but that seems impossible unless I track everything back to the beginning of each account (decades at this point for some of them).

Hi everyone,

I would like to copy the budget from last year to this year.

Example: I want to copy the July 2025 budget to July 2026. I want to do this for every month this year. Always copy last year's budget.

Is there a way to do it?

I can't figure out how to track sinking funds accurately in Actual Budget.

How a have been spending:

Each month I budget $150 for Car Insurance and put it into a savings account. When I transfer the $150 to savings I track it on the budget category as "spent." At the end of 6 months I have $900 and pay our Car Insurance with a credit card, then transfer the $900 from the savings account to the checking account and pay the credit card.

How are you tracking the $900 spend on the credit card? I have my credit cards in Actual Budget as accounts, but since I'm paying out of the sinking fund there's no category on the budget to put it in. I can make the accounts accurate, but then Actual Budget will complain about uncategorized transactions.

I budgeted the amount each month, so when I pay it, I don't have any category to put it under.

Is anyone currently using SimpleFIN for bank sync with Fidelity accounts? I got an update today from the GitHub issue and it said:

>Fidelity support is improved 🎉 If you have issues with your connection, sign in to the SimpleFIN Bridge and click "Report problem"

Can anyone confirm?

https://preview.redd.it/pcine674z1ah1.png?width=2160&format=png&auto=webp&s=24d1608a690e24da85bf732b90343bfae35d0b65

Hey everyone, I'd appreciate some outside opinions.

I'm 27M and make $90,000/year. My wife (28F) is starting a new full-time job at $17.50/hour (about $36,400/year), which is a significant pay cut from her previous role—roughly $18,700 less per year. She's leaving because the stress was taking a toll on her, and we're both comfortable with that decision, but it means we need to completely rework our budget.

I take home about $2,300 every two weeks. 10% pretax goes into my 401k with a 6% match. We don't know her exact take-home pay yet, but we're estimating around $950–$980 per paycheck after taxes.

Our household income is dropping from roughly $8,000/month to around $6,500/month, so we're trying to adjust accordingly. We also have a substantial amount of debt, and our top priority is paying off our credit cards. Over the past few months we've really changed our spending habits and have been aggressively paying down debt, so we'd like to keep that momentum going despite the income reduction.

Looking at the budget screenshot below, is there anything that stands out that we should cut or rethink?

For context, the "car payments" category is for two vehicles:

• Car 1: $333/month
• Car 2: $465.25/month

The second car is my wife's. She bought it before we were together, and unfortunately we're about $5,000 underwater on the loan, so selling it isn't really an option right now. It's simply more car than makes sense for either her previous income or her new income.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I have some schedules, like my gas bill, where the amount can vary. My gas bill range is $28-40. I might get a bill like $36.48. It seems transactions, even for schedules only match on exact values. In this case is the schedule just a placeholder or is there some way I can match these on bank import?

I'm thinking about using Actual Budget. I selfhost, and for most other apps, I've got them behind an HTTPS reverse proxy which requires a client certificate as a security measure. I've done a quick test with Actual Budget (both from desktop and mobile) and it seems to be working, but I wanted to check if any one else is running it in a similar setup and if there are any issues?

Edit to clarify: I'm not asking if the reverse proxy works. I'm specifically asking if anyone has used a setup with mTLS/client certificates.

Edit: I'm also not asking for alternatives at this time as I am happy with my setup.

Hello!! I am one of those millennials who was essentially raised to be a housewife, but lives in an area/situation where there’s just no way we can have a one income household. I don’t have the greatest job (housekeeping), but I enjoy it and I work hard to add what support I can to our household.

Recently I’ve decided another way I can support our household is to start making some things homemade - we stopped ordering pizza and buying tomato pasta sauce and stuff, we make it at home, type of thing, but I would like advice on what else I could do homemade in order to help pinch pennies. Bread is an obvious one, but what are good/healthy/easy ish ways to approach this? How do I decide what kind of bread or recipe? What are some other things I can do? Is there a chart or method I can use to plan things like this and organize chores?

I understand I can just google this stuff, but there is SO much info and I wanted advice from actual people on what things they’ve done at home that has helped save them money and keep their household clean and organized, despite working.

Anyway. Thanks in advance for any advice or recipes or organization tips. I no longer have my mother to ask direct advice like this and appreciate any and all suggestions.

Spending by category works perfectly, but spending cards and spending reports don't work in the way they should when trying to track spending by account. Even if I "exclude transfers", many accounts will show a 0 balance if everything has been paid off / balanced out; making it seem like there has been 0 spending on that account in the last few months.

What I want to see in reports is simply:
- How much did I spend from this specific account in this specific time frame?

But that seems impossible! So far, I've had to add unique #tags to every single purchase in an account, then create a Spending Card report that shows the total amount of everything from that account with that #tag. It's tedious, and I feel like there should be a better way.

I would also love to have a report that helps me see which credit cards have had a purchase in the last 6 months. My oldest credit card was just closed by the bank without my knowledge because I hadn't used it in over a year - I would like to avoid that happening again.

Is there something I should be doing differently with reports to show this information? Why is it so difficult to see simply whether or not there has been spending on this account in the last 6 months?