How to work out how much you spend a month.
What you spend in a month is everything that leaves your accounts that month. Jeff Banks works it out in Month from your imported movements, separately for each currency, and leaves out the transfers between your own accounts that it recognizes. Month's cards and tables are in Spanish for now, so their names are quoted here in Spanish.
How much do I spend a month?
Open Month and you see the current month. Its spending figure adds up every movement dated that month that takes money out of one of your accounts, whether it is a card payment, a direct debit, a cash withdrawal or a Bizum. Money coming in goes to income, and the net is what is left once spending is taken off it.
If a shop refunds a purchase, the refund counts as income for the month, under that shop's category, and the purchase stays in your spending in full.
What stays out of the sum.
A transfer between two of your accounts shows up twice, once leaving and once arriving. If Jeff Banks recognizes those two movements as a transfer, neither goes into the month's spending or income. A movement you mark yourself as “Traspaso entre cuentas” (a transfer between accounts) or “No contar en el P&L” (don't count it) stays out too.
All of them still change their account's balance. They appear in their own list at the end of Month, and the line at the top says how many were left out.
What if some of your spending is in another currency?
Each currency has its own figures and none is converted into another, so a dinner paid in pounds does not touch your spending in euros. The usual is worked out per currency too, from the months before that have income or spending in that currency.
The month's figures are on every plan.
With Free you already see, month by month, what came in, what went out and the difference between the two, and your spending split by category in a ring chart and a table. Each category leads to its movements.
How do I know if I am spending more than usual this month?
You can tell by setting it against the usual, which comes only from your own months and is the average of what you spent in the three months before, in that currency. A month with no income or spending in that currency, such as one you imported nothing for, stays out of the average. This comparison comes with Premium, which also brings trend charts and tables by merchant and, when the month has movements from two or more banks, by bank.
While the month is in progress, what you have spent up to today is set against the average of what you had spent up to the same day in those months, so rent paid at the start of the month is in both figures. A month that is over is compared whole.
What each color means.
The “Ritmo del mes” (the month's pace) card and the “vs media” (against the average) column in each table, which come with Premium, set your spending against the usual. The card shows it as a bar, along with the categories that weigh most, and the column gives the difference as a percentage. Bar and percentage turn green when you spend the same as usual or less, amber when it is up to 15% more, and red when it is more than that.
A category with no spending on those days of the earlier months reads “Nuevo” (new) instead of a percentage.
How much will the month come to?
The “Proyección de gastos” (spending projection) card, with Premium, adds to what you have spent what those three months spent from today on, by category, as a range from the lowest of them to the highest. Today counts at least as it usually does, never twice. In the example, day 10 gave €1,735.81, between €1,707.01 and €1,786.17, and the month came to €1,753.83.
How a sample home compares with its previous months.
The card shows September for a sample home, a month already over, in which its spending in euros came to €1,753.83. In June, July, and August it had spent €1,692.84, €1,803.92, and €1,681.76, and the average of those months, €1,726.17, is the usual. The month comes to 102% of the usual, a little above it, so its bar is amber.
On day 10, with the month still running, the comparison would have set the €1,296.53 spent by then against the €1,284.93 the home averaged over the same days of the months before. That is 101% of the usual. Against whole months it would have been 75%.
That month the home also paid for a trip in dollars, $454.55. With no dollars in the months before, that figure is compared with nothing and never added to the euros. The €500.00 the home moved to its savings account is not in its spending, because Jeff Banks pairs it with the money arriving in that account.
What if you have only just started?
If the three months before hold no income or spending in that currency, you see the month's figures with nothing to compare them with. If you also import last month's statement, that month becomes the usual, and each month you add goes into the average, up to three months.
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