How Are Monthly Totals Calculated

The Overview calculates your financial totals and compares them to your budgets for a selected date range. It organizes your transactions into five categories: Income, Expenses, Investments, Savings, and Debt.

Step 1: Gathering Your Transactions

The system collects all your transactions within the selected date range (from start date to end date) that:

1. Belong to you

2. Are not deleted

3. Are categorized as Income, Expenses, Investments, Savings, or Debt. Anything categorized as Transfer is excluded from your Overview.

Step 2: Calculating Transaction Totals

For each category type, the system:

1. Sums up all transaction amounts in that category for the selected period (whether positive or negative)

This gives you the actual totals for:

1. Total Income

2. Total Expenses

3. Total Investments

4. Total Savings

5. Total Debt

Step 3: Normalizing Budget Amounts

Your budgets might be set for different time periods (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly). The system converts all budgets to match your selected date range. To do this, it calculates the Annual total for each category, then divides this to get the Monthly amount.

For a full month period:

1. Weekly budgets: Multiplied by 52, then divided by 12 (to get monthly equivalent)

2. Fortnightly budgets: Multiplied by 26, then divided by 12 (to get monthly equivalent)

3. Monthly budgets: Used as-is

4. Quarterly budgets: Divided by 3 (to get monthly equivalent)

5. Yearly budgets: Divided by 12 (to get monthly equivalent)

For partial month or custom date ranges:

1. First, budgets are converted to monthly amounts (using the conversions above)

2. Then, the monthly amount is adjusted proportionally based on the number of days in your selected range

3. Formula: (Monthly Budget × 12 ÷ 365.25) × Number of Days in Range

This gives you the budgeted amounts for:

1. Budgeted Income

2. Budgeted Expenses

3. Budgeted Investments

4. Budgeted Savings

5. Budgeted Debt

Step 4: Category Breakdown

For each category you've created, the report shows:

1. The category name and type

2. The normalized budget amount for that category (adjusted to your date range)

3. The total of all transactions in that category for the selected period

If you select January 1-31:

1. Your weekly budget of $100 becomes $433.33 for the month (100 × 52 ÷ 12)

2. Your monthly budget of $500 stays $500

3. Your yearly budget of $6,000 becomes $500 for the month (6000 ÷ 12)

4. All transaction amounts from January are summed up

5. You can compare your actual totals against your normalized budgets

1. The system uses 365.25 days per year to account for leap years when calculating partial periods

2. Only transactions that are not deleted and not deleted duplicates are included

Pop us an email at support@billroo.com with a screenshot of the Overview and Transactions that aren't calculating the way you expect, and we can investigate further. We are here to help!