Budgets: monthly limits & pocket money

Under Finances → Budgets, you set monthly limits. Fixed costs continue to run via contracts – only variable expenses are budgeted.

Two kinds of budget

• Category budget: a limit for an expense category (e.g. groceries €800/month). “Spent” means the expenses in that category for the month that you're allowed to see: everything set to Whole household, plus your own private ones. That also includes private expenses where you're part of the split – so the family shop someone left as private no longer slips through unnoticed.
• Personal pot (pocket money): a limit for one person. Here, it's the person's share of the private expenses they've paid themselves that counts – and new expenses default to private. If you share a private expense with others, only your part goes into the pot. That way, the family can see the pot's status without seeing the individual private expenses.

Why you and your partner see different figures

A category budget is calculated from your point of view. Whoever has a private expense in the category sees it in their own figure – it doesn't show up for anyone else. So two people can see different percentages for the same budget, and the bell notifies each of you at your own moment too.

That's deliberate. If patchio simply counted everything, the fill level of a shared budget alone would give away that someone shopped privately – without the expense ever being seen. If you want an expense to count for everyone, set it to Whole household.

That's why the same footnote appears on the Budgets page and on the budget card in Insights – and on the Budgets page, “from your point of view” also sits right next to the figure. That's exactly where you'd compare with your partner, and two different percentages for the same budget would otherwise look like a mistake.

Traffic light & progress

In Insights (monthly view), the “Budgets from your point of view” card shows a bar with a traffic light for each budget:

• green under 80%,
• amber from 80%,
• red from 100% (budget exceeded).

The card appears in both views – “Shared” and “Only me”. That's deliberate: a category budget counts neither the shared nor the personal amount, but “what you're allowed to see”. So it doesn't belong fully to either view, and it used to be missing entirely from “Only me”. A line in the card's header explains how it differs from the categories card above it: there, “Shared” only counts what's shared-visible, and “Only me” only your share – here, every expense you can see counts at its full amount.

Tap a category budget, and patchio opens the expenses list, filtered to that category and month. The total appears above the filters – it matches the bar, because both count the same set. (The entries list in Insights doesn't: that one shows the amount for the view you've chosen.)

Rollover

Turn on “Carry the rest over to next month”, and patchio brings unused budget into the following month – and an overspend the same way. That smooths out months that swing back and forth. Without rollover, every month starts fresh at the full limit.

Notifications

As soon as a budget reaches 80% or 100%, patchio notifies you once via the bell. Category budgets notify the admins and the person who created the budget; a personal pot notifies that person themselves. You can turn this off in your notification settings.

Here too, patchio calculates it separately for each recipient, from their point of view. The figure in the notification only ever contains expenses you could look up individually anyway – so the bell never rings for you just because someone else bought something privately.