income categories
i'd like to be able to track income by a category. for us, we have some income that is "fixed" as a salary, and some income that changes month to month from freelance work. i usually enter the income payee by source so that i have that information. but then that makes figuring out how much incoming i'm getting from salary and from freelancing hard. i could just use those two categories as payees, as suggested in the help section. but then i'd loose the source and being able to track on that.
any other ideas or suggestions?
what i think i really want is different subcategories under the "to be budgeted" category.
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Actually right idea I think, just wrong execution. If you make a Category in budget called income, then each client as sub. When money comes in it would be something like this:
04/02/2018 John Doe Income: John Doe Enterprises.04/11/2018 Jane Smith Income: Jane Smith Designs
In the register it allows OUTFLOW or INFLOW.
I think something like that will give you the control you are looking for and then you can run a report on that category.
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Ruff16965 (05bd62cee897) But then wouldn't that just make the money unable to be budgeted anywhere else unless then subtracted from that categories and making it moot? I have a similar set up and I just categorize it by payee into TBB and then can look at your total income from various sources in the Income vs Expense section of Reports.
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Target Date You are right, I was thinking how I had handled refunds from Walmart, Amazon and such and it went right back into my TBB. I had a good idea it was the execution that was lacking.
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Use your Payees to differentiate the category or put keywords in the memo field for easy searching.
Remember that YNAB is first and foremost a budgeting program. As far as it's concerned, all new money to the budget is the same regardless of source. -
I think what you'll want to do is put in a simple recurring transaction for your fixed salary as Income for X Month. Then your freelance work can be income from the various payees. If the dates are always the same but amount different you can set up a recurring transaction and edit the amount when you review transactions as they occur. All of those go into the bucket of to be budgeted.
Then it's a little trickier figuring out what your subcategories are for your budget. Maybe you treat the salary as the amount you can budget for what you consider fixed expenses, and the freelance work as more fluid categories. That income should probably go under "Next Month" whereas the salary if needed could go to fund "This Month" if you're not a full month ahead. Hope this helps? ;)
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Doesn't it make more sense to make a category called "Other Income" and know that is always something that is not an expense? I think I am missing something here...
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Hi glenn !
There are definitely some things you can do on your end to label the different types of inflows. Below are a few examples.
- Adding some sort of distinction to the Payee (e.g. "Reimbursement") will alert the Income v Expense report that it was not earned income.
- Using the memo field will allow you to easily filter these inflows out.
- The flag feature in YNAB allows you to mark a transaction or group of transactions with a particular color. This is most useful to highlight certain types of transactions that aren’t necessarily the same category, but you could still use it for reimbursements inflows.
So while all inflows will be added as "Inflow: To be Budgeted", there are different ways for you to label those inflows and easily filter them out.
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The best way to handle this is just to use a tracking account to bring the income in and then transfer it into your operating account as "To be Budgeted".
