One time category
it would be nice to have a budget category that you can set for a one-time use, like if you're taking a vacation or a trip or you're doing something in a month that you want to budget out. It's only applicable to that month and it doesn't show up after that month. That'd be useful
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Comments4
team@waypointbudget
May 12
Hello again! After thinking it through with my cofounder, we're going to pass on this one.
A category that auto-vanishes would conflict with our zero-based budgeting model (every dollar should have a clear job, not a hidden expiry), and would cause issues with historical reporting, your past-month spending records would lose context once the category disappears.
For one-time expenses like a vacation, the cleanest path today is: create a regular category, use it for the month, then delete it when you're done. This shouldn’t take too long and would keep your history intact.
If we do get more interest in this, might revisit but as of now it’s too high of a risk.
Notorious926
May 12
I appreciate you considering it.
Question, if I have a vacation category set up one month and I delete it or if I have a budget set at 500 for a month and change it next month to 400
Does that have any affect on the historical data? If I go back to that month would it still show budget at 500? Or the deleted one?
team@waypointbudget
May 12
Good question! We actually shipped a piece of the puzzle for this recently :)
Scenario 1 (delete a vacation category mid-stream): History is preserved. We snapshot every budget item per month, so even after you delete the live category, when you navigate back to a past month the Vacation row still shows up with the limit and amount you had set then. The current/future months won't include it anymore (since you deleted it going forward), but the past stays intact.
Scenario 2 ($500 to $400 next month):
Go back to the prior month: $500 (your original budget at the time).
Current month: $400 (your new value).
When you change a budget amount, the system fans the old value back to all prior months as a snapshot, then applies the new value going forward. So historical dashboards and reports always show what was in effect during that specific month, not whatever the budget happens to be today.
TL;DR yep, both flows work the way you'd want. Past months are frozen-in-time snapshots of your budget at that moment, and editing or deleting today doesn't rewrite history.
Hope that answers your question!
team@waypointbudget
May 3
Could be super helpful too! This ties into another feature someone else requested which probably comes first but this would be great for those one time payments/costs!