We use [You Need A Budget (YNAB)](http://ynab.refr.cc/LFB6DJ4) for our budgeting needs. (Aside: we love it!)
There’s a particular way we decided to track my food spending at work that takes me a minute (or three) to remember every time I sit down to reconcile the budget, so I’m recording the steps for me, and the reasoning for anyone else who might want to follow this route.
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If I buy food at work, the only way to pay is to have the amount taken off my next paycheque.
This used to cause a problem for us because my food spending was often being tracked against our budget line in the month _after_ I bought the food, since we couldn’t track it until I received my paycheque/stub.
The problem was sometimes even a bit worse since my paycheques are counted as [next month’s income](https://www.youneedabudget.com/method/rule-four) in YNAB. This caused problems where I could have bought food in October, but the cheque would come in November, and only be counted towards our December budget.
Our ideal state was to continue counting income as being for the next month, but to count all food spending for the month in which I actually bought the meal.
To achieve this we added an on-budget Credit Card-type account for my cafeteria card at work, so that:
– YNAB will emulate the “buy now pay later” nature of the cafeteria card
– food spending is tracked for the month in which it is spent
– paycheques can be easily counted as Next Month’s Income when they come in
– when a paycheque comes in, a payment is made to the Cafeteria Card account to cover any food purchases deducted from that paycheque
**What this looks like in practice:**
– I buy a delicious stir-fry at work on Nov 21 for $5.95
– I swipe my physical cafeteria card in the cafeteria
– I enter $5.95 into YNAB as an Eating Out transaction on Nov 21, paying with my Cafeteria Card account within YNAB
– when my next paycheque comes out on Dec 4, it is for $994.05 instead of $1000, since the $5.95 has been deducted
When the cheque/paystub actually arrives, I enter it into YNAB:
– enter the actual amount of the cheque in Inflow (994.05), as a Split transaction
– first split: as a transfer to the Cafeteria Card account, enter the amount deducted from that cheque for food into Outflow (5.95)
– second split: put the amount remaining to assign (1000) into Inflow as Next Month’s Income
I go in this order because as soon as the $5.95 is entered YNAB tells me that $1000 is left, so I never have to actually do the calculation myself to determine what my pay would have been before the deductions.
Why this works for us:
– spending is tracked in the month of the spend, so we always know how much we _really_ have in our Eating Out line
– income and spending is accurately reflected, instead of just counting the cheque amount as income when the cheque comes, which would ignore my food spending
– this means YNAB is showing my true net income
– I get to avoid the tedium of manually calculating the gross amount on my paystub every time, and figuring out how I’m going to accurately add that and the food amounts weeks after the fact
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BTW, the first YNAB link above is a referral link — if you buy using it you get $6 off, and I get $6 from them as a thank you. They have a free 34-day trial you should check out first, though.
EDIT: 30 minutes after publishing this I found out a new version of YNAB is in the works. That new version will deprecate how YNAB currently deals with credit cards. Title now reflects that this is applicable for YNAB4 (and likely 3 — I can’t remember how it dealt with credit cards).