Budgeting for expenses that vary through the year
Some expense are seasonal in nature. A example is swimming pool expenses such as pool chemicals, water treatment and similar service costs. During winter months there are still expenses but they are much lower than for summer months.
Budgets GetReal provides a simple but powerful method to handle these expenses.
You create two budget items for the same expense. One is for the winter months and the other is for the summer months. The two schedules are specified not to overlap. An example of how you would enter the summer months is as follows.
By specifying the payment period as Monthly you are assuming that your expenses occur once per month. This may not be correct for summer – you may need to purchase chemicals weekly. If this case you would adjust the Amount to $25-00, paid Weekly with the component expiring after 26 times.
The “Repeat pattern next year” option will not show until you have entered a number into the Expires after times field. This number must result in only a part year being budgeted – otherwise the calculation makes no sense and so the option won’t show.
The entry for the winter months is similar but say for 6 months starting 15/3/2008 and for $30-00 paid Monthly.
Note also the use of the 5% allowance per year for inflation. This is simply a guess to refine the accuracy of your budgets should you forget to revise them for some time.
