Allocating Your Opening Balance to Envelopes

Allocating Your Opening Balance to Envelopes

After adding a bank account, you will most likely have a transaction for your opening balance. If not, create a transaction manually and add a deposit for the amount of your opening balance.

Opening Balance Transaction

Click on the “move to unallocated income box” button as highlighted in the screenshot above.

To allocated this money to your envelopes, click the “Allocate” tab or, hover over the “Unallocated Income” box and click the “allocate funds button. (See screenshot below.)

Allocate

You will then be taken to the allocation view where you can allocate the funds from you “unallocated income box” to your various envelopes.

Allocate View

Begin entering amounts for each envelope you want to allocate to. Notice at the top of the screen you can see the amount you have available to allocate (1). As you enter amounts for each envelope (4), the total amount you have specified to be allocated with be displayed (2) as well as the total amount left to allocate (3).

The goal is to make a plan for every dollar you own. So you are trying to move all of the unallocated funds to envelopes. Once the total left amount (3) is zero, then click the “Allocate Funds” button to actually allocate these funds.

It may be important to note that this is a virtual representation of the money in your bank. Your actual bank account will not be affected and not even be aware of what you are doing in Envelope Budget.

Next: Getting Paid and Creating Allocation Plans