Introduction
A common use case for Money Dashboard is helping people to understand spending patterns. We all have areas we wish we occasionally overspend. Money Dashboard provides the tools (particularly in our categorisation and spending plan features). We will run through the best way to visualise your spending in this article.
Concerned about spending in a specific retailer or area?
What about comparing what I have spent this month against last month?
Topic Area
Scenario Guide
Relevant to users on:
Money Dashboard Neon
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If you are unsure if you are on Money Dashboard Classic or Money Dashboard Neon? You can find that information here
Disclaimer
All content is for informational purposes only and is the opinion of the author. Nothing on this website should be interpreted as "advice". Money Dashboard Ltd make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, suitability or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors or omissions or any damages arising from its display or use.
Categories and Budgets
When your transactions come in you may notice that they get automatically assigned a Category. This is one of our pre-set fields but you can always customize it to what you want. In spend analysis you can see how much you have spent in a given category in the current time period. You can put multiple categories under a budget in the spending plan feature to see how you are doing towards the end of your pay cycle. The most important first step is to ensure that all your transactions are correctly categorised.
If you are looking at analysing your spending over a period that is not fixed to your pay cycle, you can use the 'Overview' functionality on the web application to do this.
1. Use the 'Time period' filter to select the period you wish to analyse your spends
2. Filter the relevant categories and accounts you wish to see. For example, you might want to be excluding your 'Savings' accounts in this view.
Concerned about spending in a specific retailer or area?
One of the categories we offer is experiences. That might be too broad for you. If you go to the cinema a lot you could create a custom category called cinema and then categorise all the transactions you have relevant to the cinema with the cinema category. See how expensive this has been over the current pay cycle by locating the 'Cinema' category in your Overview section. If you are wanting to understand how much you have spent in an area over a period longer than the existing pay cycle, you can do this via the full web application.
1. Select 'Overview' on your side navigational bar
2. Use the 'Time period' filter to select the period you wish to analyse your spends
3. Filter the 'Cinema' category. Ensure that all accounts that you might have been spending at a cinema are toggled on too under the 'Accounts' selection.
What about comparing what I have spent this month against last month?
Similar to the above examples, this time round you will be using the 'Overview:Trends' on your full web application to view this information.
1. Select 'Overview' on your side navigational bar
2. Click on 'Trends' (the default view on Overview is the breakdown)
3. Use the 'Time period' filter first to select the frequency you wish to analyse your spends (e.g. by weeks, months , year or by pay cycle)
4. Filter the relevant spend categories using the 'Categories' filter. Ensure that all accounts that you might have been spending at across the selected categories are toggled on under the 'Accounts' selection.
5. Lastly, use the 'Compare against' to choose how far back you wish to compare your spends against