Resources
Deleting resources
Envelope Zero soft deletes all resources, meaning they are marked as deleted, but not completely gone. Once restoring of deleted resources is implemented, you will be able to restore these resources. Currently, restoring deleted resources needs manual editing of the database and is not recommended.
Soft-deleting is not done for budgeted amounts for a month (which are stored in an allocation), those are always permanently deleted.
Resources
Budget
A budget might represent your own personal budget, the budget of your flat share or any other budget that you want to track.
Account
An account represents an account as an accountant would use it. For example, cash in your wallet, an actual bank account, a credit card are all distinct accounts. Every other person or company you pay money to also is tracked as an account. This allows for detailed accounting of how much spending occurs towards e.g. a specific supermarket.
An account can have a starting balance to represent the amount that was in the account before you started budgeting. The starting balance is always treated as reconciled.
Category
A category is a grouping of envelopes for similar purposes. You might for example want to group envelopes for different saving goals like a new couch, the next vacation etc. in a category called “Saving“.
Envelope
The key of the budget. Each envelope tracks budget for one specific purpose, e.g. groceries. Any transaction you make for groceries gets linked to this envelope, allowing you to track how much you spent on groceries in a month.
If you do not spend all of the allocated budget, it rolls over to the next month. This allows to allocate a budget for expenses that do not occur that often. Say you have an insurance that is billed yearly for 120€. In this case, you can budget 10€ per month for this insurance. Once the bill arrives, all the needed budget is already allocated.
If you overspend on an Envelope, the overspent amount will be subtracted from the amount available to be budgeted in the next month.
Transaction
A transaction represents an actual transaction. Paying for groceries, getting paid your salary, gifting somebody money for their wedding, all of those are transactions. Every transaction must be tied to a source account and destination account.
All transactions that are not income should be tied to an envelope so that you can see what you spend money for.
Allocation
An allocation is the database representation of the sum that is budgeted for a month for a specific envelope.