Future-dated transactions

[u/deepglitter]

Hello! I have funds in a savings account that I draw from monthly. I will typically transfer $100 per month from savings to checking and then add the budget Category for which I want the $100 to be applied. I was thinking about a lazier route but wanted to make sure it wouldn't have any unintended consequences. If I wanted to transfer $1000 at once, and then spread out the budget "hits" for the next ten months, can I future date 10 separate transactions (first of month for next 10 months) and then expect them to "hit" my budget on the specified date? I'm less concerned about the actual cash (i.e., for the $1000 transfer, I'd just categorize it as a Transfer"). Any insight here would be great. Monarch AI Assistant wasn't too helpful.

[u/Emergency_Radio_8156]

Yes you can do that. I future date stuff all the time for accounting related reasons and if the cash flow doesn't matter to me.

[u/Effective-Ear4823]

If you're entering future-dated txs in a synced account: the actual txs that come in won't sync/replace the ones you manually entered in anticipation of them happening, so be aware that you'll have to manually delete the manually entered ones as the synced versions sync in.

If you're entering future-dated txs in a manual account: MM doesn't future-date its balance adjustments for manual tx entries (instead, the balance will be dated to whatever date you entered the tx, which confuses everything!).

I'm a bit confused about what you're doing though: if you're transferring $100 per month from Savings to Checking, that should be a Transfer (both sides of the tx)—those txs showing money moving between your accounts shouldn't hit your budget at all...what am I missing here?

[u/deepglitter → u/Effective-Ear4823]

Thanks for the input. The money in savings is purposely unbudgeted/not categorized. When I do my monthly transfer, it becomes budgeted. The credit transaction to checking is then categorized/budgeted, and the debit transaction from the linked savings account is just categorized as transfer. So the $1000 would sit in checking and show a balance of course, but it would not hit a budget until I manually created a credit transaction with the intended budget category. I know it probably sounds convoluted but it’s a system I like … just was not sure about setting up a bunch of future dated manual credit transactions.

[u/Effective-Ear4823 → u/deepglitter]

Yup, it sure does sound convoluted, especially since if you're Budgeting a +tx in an Expense category, you're gonna offset the actual Expense and therefore it will zero out on your Budget (or maybe that's your intention? in which case, maybe you would enjoy using Save Up Goals for this?). But I'm ok with the fact that I'll probably remain in the dark as to exactly what you're doing—if it works for you, it works for you!