Budgeting with Notenik | Notenik Knowledge Base

11.14 Budgeting with Notenik

At first glance, making use of Notenik for budgeting may seem rather odd. (And, truth to tell, perhaps even on second glance as well).

But let me explain.

I’m in the habit every fall of putting together a family budget for the coming year.

And then I use some sort of personal finance tool to track our spending as the year progresses, comparing it to the budget.

The finance tools generally have a way of establishing a budget, but I don’t like using those tools for coming up with the budget, for several reasons:

I sometimes experiment with different tools, so I want the initial budget to be independent from the tracking tool;
The personal finance apps generally make you set up categories in one place, and then enter budget numbers for the categories in a different place, and I like to be able to do both at once;
The finance apps generally only allow you two levels of categories, and I sometimes want more (for tracking individual subscriptions, for example);
Every finance app seems to offer a different way of spreading an annual budget across the months of the year, and most of these approaches make data entry cumbersome.

And so, for all these reasons, I’m in the habit of creating my budget in a separate app.

So, why not use a spreadsheet?

That’s a good question, and for many years I have.

But then this year I got an early start on the effort, and it occurred to me that Notenik could be used for this, with a couple of additional pieces of functionality, and so I decided to give it a whirl.

Part of my motivation goes back to one of my original reasons for creating Notenik: I wanted discrete fields, but I also wanted a place for free-form text, and I didn’t want both uncomfortably crammed into a single set of rows and columns.

And so here’s the recipe for creating a budget collection with Notenik.

Starter Pack

Use the Budget Pack to initialize your new budgeting collection.

Fields

First, start with the right ingredients: in this case, fields.

Title – The brief title for this budget line. There should generally be one top-level Note titled ‘Income’, and another titled ‘Expense’.
Seq – This field is used both to keep things in whatever sequence you’d prefer, and to express varying levels of depth within an implied outline structure.
Amount – This should contain the decimal value of the amount to be budgeted per month for this item. If this is a summary line (meaning that detail is provided at a lower level within the outline), then the Amount field should be left blank.
Spread – This should contain the names (or 3-letter abbreviations) of the months for which the amount should be budgeted; if this field is left blank, then the amount will be spread to all months.
Discretionary (defined as a Boolean field) – Check this box to indicate that this is a line item whose amounts can be varied from month to month, at the user’s discretion.
Link – Use this field to store any kind of reference link that may be useful when managing this item.
Body – Use the Body field for any notes you want to associate with the line item.

Entry and Review

You’ll want to sort your budget collection by Seq + Title.

Note that you can use the Seq field to enter your budget in the form of an outline, and then make use of all the available Notenik tools for creating, managing and reviewing an outline, including the Outline Tab.

Export to CSV

Once you have all your budget items entered, you’re ready to export into a format that can be viewed as a spreadsheet.

For this you can use the Export as Budget Spread function. This will produce a nice little CSV file with your amounts spread into appropriate columns by month, your annual amounts totaled, and your high-level summary totals filled in.

Can this be imported into your financial app? Well, no: as far as I can tell, none of these tools provide a category/budget import function.

But it may make your data entry easier. And it does provide an ongoing reference to how much you intended to spend on various categories.

FWIW, I just did a little comparison of Banktivty vs. Monarch Money, and ended up choosing Monarch Money for this year. We’ll see how it goes!

Also, FWIW, while you can open your CSV export file using either Apple’s Numbers app, or MS Excel, I chose to open it using the relatively new Nought Spreadsheet app, and was really happy with the resulting presentation.