Bucket balance is greater than Account balance

[Daniel]

Sorry to deviate from the riveting iPhone discourse, but I have a
question and I think it may have gotten buried in a previous post. I
just balanced my MoneyWell (see previous post "Checking Balance is
off") and now my bucket have more money than my accounts. Everything
is great - I'm reconciled and my daily transactions match those of my
banks, which means that the running balance in MoneyWell and the
running balance at my bank match.

Now I'd like to know how to rectify the discrepancy between my
accounts and my buckets. Can I just delete the data in my buckets and
redistribute money from my accounts?

Thanks.

daniel

[The Watkinson Family]

Daniel,

You wouldn't really be able to delete the data in your buckets.... in
doing so, you would also be deleting your transactions. Unless you
are just talking about the Money Flows.

To correct the out-of-balance condition, I recommend changing your
Initial Cash Flow amount by the difference of the error. This will
likely create a deficit in one of your income buckets. That's okay.
From here, you have several choices.

1) Reflow the money between buckets to correct the deficit
2) Delete all money flows in all buckets and basically start from
scratch by moving money to the buckets you want from the money in the
income bucket
3) Allow the deficit to stand, recognizing that if you were to
actually spend the amount of money in your expense buckets you will
overdraw your cash (checking, cash, credit card accounts) by the
amount of the deficit in your income bucket until you receive enough
income to correct the deficit.

Grace to you,
Blair

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Mar 25, 2009, at 4:31 PM, Daniel wrote:

Hi Daniel,

Usually this happens when money flows are off. You can edit/delete
money flows by clicking a bucket and changing them in the Bucket
Detail to the right. Use the remove button (-) to remove selected
money flows or double-click on an amount (or date) to make a change.

You also might want to investigate starting your cash flow over on
April 1, 2009.

Peace,

Kevin Hoctor
ke...@nothirst.com
No Thirst Software LLC
http://nothirst.com
http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com

[Patricia Cross]

When that happened to me, it was because I had a transfer between
accounts that was not properly bucket-assigned. Actually it was
several, some of which should have had buckets and didn't, some of
which did have buckets and shouldn't.

If it's not an initial starting balance issue, you might want to look
at your transfers.

-Trish

[Lance]

When this happened to me recently, I found it was because I had
started tracking expenses in MoneyFlow as of March 1st, but every time
I use the Download feature to get transactions from my checking
account, it downloads a bunch of transactions from February that throw
off the amounts (for some reason I don't have this problem on my other
accounts).

I'm assuming this is because my checking account returns some fixed
date range of transactions to MoneyWell and this will eventually go
away once we get into April. For now, I'm just manually deleting all
the old transactions after every download and then my balances match
up.

Also if you enter in future transactions, you need to make sure you
are hiding those when comparing the balances.

[Daniel]

Thanks to Lance,Blair, Trish, and Kevin for your responses. I tried
Trish's approach with the transfers. It helped, but then created a
new negative balance in my credit card account (which really is 0). I
appreciate Lance's comments but they really don't apply as I never use
the download feature (I did once, but found that I wanted to go
through each item anyway and check for duplicates and/or change the
name to a more friendly payee title; also, the downloads came in all
caps, which I didn't like, but that's just a stylistic thing and I'm
pretty sure MW has no control over that.)

I tried editing the money flows, as Kevin suggested. However, when I
deleted an item in one bucket it simply added that amount to my salary
bucket, from which it originally came.

To be honest, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm really unclear how it is
even possible to have more money in buckets than in accounts. That
seems to be antithetical to the very core of MoneyWell. However, it
may just underscore the fact that understanding the intricacies of
finances has never been easy for me. That is why I love MoneyWell.
The simplicity and the power of the application makes for a great tool
for me.

So now I am just wondering about starting over. If I did that I would
like to start at Jan. 1 as I have 26 transactions in a bucket I use
for my business (a sole proprietary business), so I'd like to have
that for 2009 tax information. Is there a way that I can archive my
current data and start anew?

Thanks,

dan

[Kevin Hoctor]

Daniel,

If you want to start over with money flows, just change your start
date to April 1, 2009 and work from there forward.

If that's not enough of a "do over" then use File > Export to export
all your transactions (uncheck the filter option when it appears),
create a new document (cancel the buckets and accounts panels) and
import that back in. You'll have all your buckets and transactions
without any money flows.

[Daniel Shanahan]

Ugh!  I'm getting more and more confused about my quandary.  I've spent the last 4 1/2 hours trying to get my MoneyWell account in some kind of workable condition.  I'm hesitant to do anything with my original account now that I have this new deficit in my credit card account.  I'm not sure how it got there (it was something I did while trying to "fix" my document), but I do know my credit card balance is 0.

The closest I was able to come was downloading transactions from the beginning of the year from my bank account.  This, of course, imports into MoneyWell quite nicely.  It is soooo close.  The account balance is correct; I have transactions from the beginning of the year; Items are not allocated to buckets, but I can do than manually.  What I cannot do is get the salary bucket to have any money in it.  

To illustrate, let's say that I have five accounts: a personal checking account, a personal savings, account, a business checking account, a credit card account, and a cash account.  Furthermore, let's say that I only have money in three accounts: personal checking, personal savings, and business checking.  The credit card and cash accounts are 0 balance.  For illustration purposes, let's say I have $500 in each of these three accounts.  I would like my salary bucket - from which all other buckets get filled - to have $1,000.  I don't want the savings money ($500) to go to the salary bucket because I want to save that money, not allocate it.  However, I don't seem to be able to do this.  Very frustrating.

As a number of people have given suggestions what they do when their buckets have more money than their accounts I once again ask "How is it possible to allocate more money than I have?"  This seems to go against the very essence of MoneyWell.

In the end, I may end up taking Kevin's advice and starting fresh in April (as an aside, I tried changing my computer's date to Jan. 1, 2009 and then adding a starting balance on that date, but eventually that strategy failed).  I wish I could have a complete year in MoneyWell, mostly for tax purposes.

I'm also unclear why it is not possible to delete the data that is in a bucket.  This should not affect a transaction because it hasn't been used for a transaction.  It's just virtual money in a bucket.

Ok... I'm done venting.  I still like (really, really like) the program and will continue with it.

Thanks.

daniel

--
Daniel Shanahan
Oakland, CA  94610

[Tony]

Daniel,
You're not alone. I feel your pain. I've spent the past few days
working on getting mine right, I've watched every video 2-3 times and
read and sometimes re-read the great articles. Also searched through
previous posts, etc... I think I've finally done it!

Start by making sure nothing is allocated from your checking/savings/
business accounts. Your salary bucket should be zero. If it's not,
then there is something somewhere that is either drawing or adding to
that bucket. You have to find it.
If it is zero, then Assign only the credits (income) or your initial
balance transaction from one of the accounts (your example $500) to
the salary bucket. You should see $500 reflected in that bucket.
Repeat for the other 2 accounts the same way.

Hope this helps. I'm really a newbie. I hope this is the right way
to do it, but it seems like this worked for me.

Tony

[Tony]

Correction.. I mean repeat only for the 2 accounts. Don't send your
savings credit amount to the Salary bucket.

[The Watkinson Family]

Kevin and Daniel,

One thing that I didn't like about the export and import is that the export and import functions aren't fully reversible (at least not when I did this a few months ago since Jan 1).

It may be pretty obscure, but I had been using Alt + Enter in order to use multiple lines in my memos.  If I remember right, any data that wasn't on the first line was lost.  I think that I also had problems with splits, but I could be remembering incorrectly.

Anyway, Daniel, when starting a new, I would leave the Initial Cash Flow at 0.  Then, I would assign each of my accounts' Starting Balances to an Income bucket.  This will ensure that you don't have any more money in your buckets than you actually have in your account.  I'll expand on your illustration on how I might setup your accounts.

Personal Checking $500

Credit Card $0

Business Checking $500

Cash $0

---------------------------

Personal Savings $500

The "---------------------" above is actually an account name.  I named it that way in my document to serve as a divider between two different types of accounts.  The accounts above the line are my "cash accounts."  They are accounts from which I would put money into envelopes and spend money from envelopes if I were using an envelope system.  The accounts below the line include savings, investments, loans, etc.  These are both assets and liabilities that I'd like to track, but that I do not use for cash flow.  The money in Personal Savings, or a Mortgage, or a car loan or Retirement Account would not be used to fund my groceries bucket.  These types of accounts I put below the dashed line.

Now, when assigning the starting balance for any account above the line, I assign it to an income bucket.  If you do that in this case, you'll have $1000 in the Income bucket.  On the other hand, for any account below the line, you do not assign the Starting Balance to an Income bucket.

Now, observe the following rules:

• Whenever you spend money or deposit money from/into an account above the line, you assign the transfer to a bucket (again, this is just like spending money from your envelopes).
• Whenever you spend money or deposit money directly from/into an account below the line, you do not assign the transfer to a bucket.
• When you transfer money between accounts and you do not cross the dashed line, you do not assign the transfer to a bucket (this is just moving around).
• When you cross the dashed line with a transfer, assign the transfer on the account on the side of the dashed line to a bucket.  Two examples offered below:
• Assume you are investing money in your Savings account from your Personal Checking account.  This is treated as an "expense," even though the money remains yours.  It's as if you took money from your Savings envelope and walked down to the bank and put it in a Savings account.  You would need to deduct the money from the envelope.  A transfer has two sides--the withdrawal side and the transfer side.  You can toggle between them in MoneyWell with the "Show Matching" button.  In this scenario, you would assign the transfer that's in the account above the line to a bucket--in other words, assign the withdrawal from Personal Checking to the expense bucket "Savings."  This will decrease the bucket amount as we decrease the amount we have in Personal Checking.
• Now, assume you are moving money from Savings to your Personal Checking account so that you can pay for Emergency Car Repairs.  This is as if you went to the bank and withdrew money from Savings to put into your Emergency envelope.  Again, following the general rule above, you'll assign the transaction that's in the account above the line to a bucket.  In this case, the transaction in  Personal Checking is a deposit.  We'll assign that deposit to your Emergency bucket, thus increasing the bucket as we increase the amount in Checking.

If you setup MoneyWell the way I suggested above, and your account balances are in fact accurate, and you assign the Start Date correctly, and follow the four rules above (which, hopefully, are fairly intuitive if you understand the types of accounts above and below the line), the total money you have in your cash accounts will always equal the total money in your buckets.

Please let me know if something doesn't make sense.

Grace to you,

Blair Watkinson

[Mr. Danno Sullivan]

This is an extremely clear and helpful explanation. (I've been having similar difficulties to the original poster).

The fact that you have to write it up as you did, and the fact that I have now printed it to have next to my computers, seems to indicate a difficulty that some people have with the program. I love MoneyWell and think it is by far the best solution I've found for money managing--UNTIL something goes a little out of whack and then (for me) it's really, really hard to understand how to make fixes.

I would love to see some of these paths spelled out for us dummies within the software; safeguards that might keep us from fouling things up in the first place.

ds

[Daniel Shanahan]

Blair,

Thank you very much for this explanation.  It is quite helpful.

I recreated my accounts according to your suggestions and have found a few "traits" of MoneyWell that I didn't know existed before.  Frankly, for my scenario, I find them annoying.  However, I presume the behavior is to prevent something else that could be damaging, though I don't know what that would be (Kevin, can you shed any light on this?).  Here is what I found:

It seems that if I create a starting balance on any date prior to the current month, that number does not stay in the salary bucket.  In other words, I can either have a starting date deposit which starts on Jan.1, 2009 and that money will not be available in my salary bucket OR I can have a starting date deposit which starts no earlier than the beginning of the current month and that money will be in the salary bucket.

Similarly, when I imported transactions, I found that if the transaction was from this month, it showed up as a deficit in the appropriate bucket.  However, if the date was prior to this month, it did not show up in any bucket.  I needed this deficit to display so that I could allocate money from the salary bucket to the appropriate bucket.   When I changed the transaction date to this month, it worked, leaving the correct amount in my salary bucket (which is the total of my accounts).

To compensate for this behavior I changed the transaction date to the current month and added the actual transaction date in the memo in brackets ([m/d/yy]).  The status date also has the day it was Reconciled.

It may be worth noting that I only really needed to import a few records, so this was not too laborious.  Moreover, I still have my original MoneyWell document in which the transactions are correct.

Also, Blair, in your four rules, I would change a couple of words for clarity's sake (marked in brackets):

1 Whenever you spend money or deposit money from/into an account above the line, you assign the transfer [transaction] to a bucket (again, this is just like spending money from your envelopes).

2 Whenever you spend money or deposit money directly from/into an account below the line, you do not assign the transfer [transaction] to a bucket.

4a     A transfer has two sides--the withdrawal side and the transfer [deposit] side.

        I found this statement in #4 to be unclear, "assign the transfer on the account on the side of the dashed line to a bucket."  Your examples are helpful (4a and 4b).  If I understand it correctly, can it not be said that whenever creating a transfer across the lines, always assign the bucket to the cash account (in the example of this thread, that means to the account above the line)?

Finally, I created a very simple matrix of what I understand Blair's rule sot express:

                 +/- Above           +/- Below           Transfer no cross        Transfer cross

              +-------------------+--------------------+----------------------------+----------------------+

Bucket  |         Yes           |           No            |              No                   |            Yes            |

              |                           |                             |                                      |                               |

              +-------------------+--------------------+----------------------------+----------------------+

Thanks,

- daniel

[Lance]

> It seems that if I create a starting balance on any date prior to the
> current month, that number does not stay in the salary bucket.  In other
> words, I can either have a starting date deposit which starts on Jan.1, 2009
> and that money will not be available in my salary bucket OR I can have a
> starting date deposit which starts no earlier than the beginning of the
> current month and that money will be in the salary bucket.
>
> Similarly, when I imported transactions, I found that if the transaction was
> from this month, it showed up as a deficit in the appropriate bucket.
> However, if the date was prior to this month, it did not show up in any
> bucket.  I needed this deficit to display so that I could allocate money
> from the salary bucket to the appropriate bucket.   When I changed the
> transaction date to this month, it worked, leaving the correct amount in my
> salary bucket (which is the total of my accounts).
>

It sounds like you probably started your cash flow this month (Edit >
Change Cash Flow Start Date). Any transactions before your cash flow
start date will be ignored (as they should). This date should
represent the sum of all your account balances on that day (i.e. how
much spending money you had available in all accounts that day). This
is why transactions before this date are essentially ignored
(MoneyWell assumes you put the right amount in for your starting cash
flow).

If you want to start tracking transactions from before this date,
change your cash flow start date to January 1st (or whatever month you
want to start) and then all transactions after that will affect your
buckets like you expect.

-Lance

[Terry Norton]

On Mar 29, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Daniel Shanahan wrote:

It seems that if I create a starting balance on any date prior to the current month, that number does not stay in the salary bucket.  In other words, I can either have a starting date deposit which starts on Jan.1, 2009 and that money will not be available in my salary bucket OR I can have a starting date deposit which starts no earlier than the beginning of the current month and that money will be in the salary bucket.

Similarly, when I imported transactions, I found that if the transaction was from this month, it showed up as a deficit in the appropriate bucket.  However, if the date was prior to this month, it did not show up in any bucket.  I needed this deficit to display so that I could allocate money from the salary bucket to the appropriate bucket.   When I changed the transaction date to this month, it worked, leaving the correct amount in my salary bucket (which is the total of my accounts).

To compensate for this behavior I changed the transaction date to the current month and added the actual transaction date in the memo in brackets ([m/d/yy]).  The status date also has the day it was Reconciled.

It may be worth noting that I only really needed to import a few records, so this was not too laborious.  Moreover, I still have my original MoneyWell document in which the transactions are correct.

Yup, what Lance said!

MoneyWell, at it's core, is just like any other accounting app, that it keeps track of all your transactions: deposits, checks you write, withdrawals.  What this means is that if you really wanted to, you could use MW just like all those other apps, completely ignoring all those MoneyFlow deficits and surpluses you see next to all those income and expense buckets because MoneyFlows have no effect at all on your transactions.  But we don't use MW that way because we want to make use of the MoneyFlow features for which MW is so fabulous.

What you have described above means you haven't quite got MW setup properly for what you want.  However, you really don't need to do the extra work you're wanting to do with MoneyFlows, but you can if you so chose.  After a month is in the past and all those bills and expenses are already paid, you do not need to pretend you still have the money to pay those past expenses and that they haven't been paid yet.  If you do MoneyFlows for past months, pretending is what you're doing.  The transactions are already done, and their history is in your transaction register.

What MoneyFlows are for is to handle your future spending for the bills that are coming due.  You take the money that's still in your accounts (checking, savings, etc) and disperse it into buckets so you know the money is there to pay the bill when it comes due.  It's also so late in March that you'd be better off just starting to keep track of MoneyFlows starting April 1.

Terry Norton

I started off with nothing...I still have most of it left.

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Mar 27, 2009, at 4:47 PM, Daniel Shanahan wrote:

Ugh!  I'm getting more and more confused about my quandary.  I've spent the last 4 1/2 hours trying to get my MoneyWell account in some kind of workable condition.  I'm hesitant to do anything with my original account now that I have this new deficit in my credit card account.  I'm not sure how it got there (it was something I did while trying to "fix" my document), but I do know my credit card balance is 0.

The closest I was able to come was downloading transactions from the beginning of the year from my bank account.  This, of course, imports into MoneyWell quite nicely.  It is soooo close.  The account balance is correct; I have transactions from the beginning of the year; Items are not allocated to buckets, but I can do than manually.  What I cannot do is get the salary bucket to have any money in it.  

To illustrate, let's say that I have five accounts: a personal checking account, a personal savings, account, a business checking account, a credit card account, and a cash account.  Furthermore, let's say that I only have money in three accounts: personal checking, personal savings, and business checking.  The credit card and cash accounts are 0 balance.  For illustration purposes, let's say I have $500 in each of these three accounts.  I would like my salary bucket - from which all other buckets get filled - to have $1,000.  I don't want the savings money ($500) to go to the salary bucket because I want to save that money, not allocate it.  However, I don't seem to be able to do this.  Very frustrating.

As a number of people have given suggestions what they do when their buckets have more money than their accounts I once again ask "How is it possible to allocate more money than I have?"  This seems to go against the very essence of MoneyWell.

In the end, I may end up taking Kevin's advice and starting fresh in April (as an aside, I tried changing my computer's date to Jan. 1, 2009 and then adding a starting balance on that date, but eventually that strategy failed).  I wish I could have a complete year in MoneyWell, mostly for tax purposes.

I'm also unclear why it is not possible to delete the data that is in a bucket.  This should not affect a transaction because it hasn't been used for a transaction.  It's just virtual money in a bucket.

Ok... I'm done venting.  I still like (really, really like) the program and will continue with it.

Daniel,

It looks like Blair gave you advice that is working but I'd just like to clarify some issues:

 1. You don't have to change your computer date to import transactions. You can have as much historic data as you'd like yet start you cash flow tracking over at any time without losing that. Your bank statements and past transactions are nice to have so you can see your spending trends.

 2. To start fresh on April 1, 2009, you would simply add up the cash you have left to spend and use that as your starting cash flow amount. Just total your account balances from the end of day prior. Remember to exclude any savings or credit cards since those are typically not part of your available spending money.

 3. If you have transactions history (point 1 above), then you can't just assign your starting balance transactions to your Salary bucket. Instead, use point 2 to set up your money to spend. Just know that you won't see that money as available to spend until April 1. Don't delete history just to try and fix cash flow please.

Let me know if you have more questions.

[Daniel Shanahan]

Thank you, Lance, Terry, and Kevin.

Lance, you are correct - I did not know that I could change the cash flow start date.  I have since watched the video tutorial.

Terry, I appreciate your comments about MoneyFlow.  I'm ok with not knowing the MoneyFlow for my new document.  I have my original document that contains the MoneyFlow.  However, since the buckets and accounts were not matching, I wanted to start over.  The only transactions I am really concerned about tracking from Jan. 1 are those from my business.  I'd like to print an end of year report for tax purposes.

Kevin, thank you for your continued support of your product.  Yes, Blair's advice seems to make sense to me, so, as Lance suggested, I changed my cash flow start date to Jan. 1.

I think I am all set (I'm sure I'll need to periodically reassess to make sure buckets and accounts match and to make sure I understand Blair's rules).  

I appreciate all those who have commented to this thread.

daniel

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 4:19 AM, Daniel Shanahan wrote:

Kevin, thank you for your continued support of your product.  Yes, Blair's advice seems to make sense to me, so, as Lance suggested, I changed my cash flow start date to Jan. 1.

Daniel,

I hope you meant April 1 and not January. It would be incredibly difficult to go back and create money flows for historic months.

[Daniel Shanahan]

Thanks for your note, Kevin.

It does mean Jan. 1.  I set the cash flow date to the beginning of the year in order to keep my business transactions from my original document.  There is no MoneyFlow for any of these transactions, but that is fine with me.  I think the MoneyFlows will start with any new transaction.

Now that I've changed the cash flow date to Jan. 1, 2009, my buckets have the correct amount, my salary bucket (the only income bucket I have) shows the correct total of my checking accounts (personal and business), and the bucket amount is correct (currently $0 as I have not allocated any money into any buckets).

daniel

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 1:25 PM, Daniel Shanahan wrote:

Thanks for your note, Kevin.

It does mean Jan. 1.  I set the cash flow date to the beginning of the year in order to keep my business transactions from my original document.  There is no MoneyFlow for any of these transactions, but that is fine with me.  I think the MoneyFlows will start with any new transaction.

Now that I've changed the cash flow date to Jan. 1, 2009, my buckets have the correct amount, my salary bucket (the only income bucket I have) shows the correct total of my checking accounts (personal and business), and the bucket amount is correct (currently $0 as I have not allocated any money into any buckets).

Daniel,

If you don't have any money flows but your have historic transactions from Jan. 1, 2009, you're cash flow is going to be very wrong. Here's why:

 1. Add payroll checks of $1000 twice a month for 3 months

 2. Don't allocate any of this salary for those 3 months

 3. Salary bucket will show you have $6000 to spend when I doubt you do

I may be missing something in your setup but unless you start cash flow and allocate starting at that point, the in and out flows of transactions will skew your actual amount in each bucket.

Also, having cash flow history doesn't help in most cases because it isn't as relevant as spending history. That's why MoneyWell allows you to restart your cash flow tracking at the beginning of any month so you can clean the slate.