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How does editing this month’s plan affect past and future months?

Each month is its own special plan, built off the previous month’s plan. Editing a month won’t change past months.

Let’s give an example. Say you were spending $200 on car gas for January through March, and in April gas spikes and you’re now paying $275, we want you to be able to adjust April, but we don’t want that to affect January, February, or March. We want to keep them where they were.

So you can edit any individual month’s amounts, but it’s only going to affect that month.

NOW … if you haven’t yet created the next month’s budget, when that month comes around and you *do* create it, it’ll use the latest numbers from the current month.

So … let’s say you budgeted $250 for car gas in December (because you had to travel), and then you make January’s budget. It starts off at $250, but you knock it down to $200. When February’s budget gets created, it’ll use January’s number, and give you $200 as your budget. You leave it for February, and for March. But at the beginning of April, you look at what you spent in March, and it’s $260. Yikes! As you make April’s budget, you might bump it up to $275, to reflect the higher prices. You might also then go back to March and fiddle with some of the numbers … say you had money in “groceries” that went unspent. You could increase the “car gas” budget for March by $60 and drop the “groceries” budget for March by $60, and everything would line up nicely.

For the record, we don’t encourage going back into past months to fiddle with your Plan numbers (like at the end of that example), but we recognize that sometimes it’s necessary.

If that didn’t answer your question, get in touch with us by e-mail, at help@pearbudget.com.