Keeping track of individual financial transactions is an important recordkeeping function, for tax purposes, warranty claims, etc.
It is also desireable to look at cashflow in terms of budget categories, i.e. available funding for specific purposes. Knowing the bank account balance is of no value if you don't know how much of that balance should be held in reserve for semi-annual, annual, and long-term expenditures.
A very well-designed business accounting tool may include both of these tools. However, if you are using a manual accounting process, or if your accounting software does not provide a budget category view of your cash balance, WinBudget may give you the extra budget control that you need, at a very low cost.
This Windows application is very simple to set up and use. After defining your budget categories, individual budget items, and an amount that needs to be allocated to each item on a periodic basis of your choice, you simply distribute your current account balance into the budgets you have defined, and you are ready for "budget maintenance".
Budget maintenance is a matter of debiting appropriate budget categories for each expense receipt or bank account debit record, adding random credits back in, and when appropriate, recovering from abnormal situations by crediting or pulling funds from one of two reserve funds.
When a normal periodic deposit to the bank occurs, you reflect that by using the 'Distributed Deposit' dialog, which funds all of the budget categories per your established allocations, and dumps any excess from the deposit into the 'Reserve' bucket. If a miscellaneous deposit is made which is not to be used for normal budget distribution (and is not to be credited to one specific budget item), it is credited to the 'Undistributed Deposit' bucket, and can be manually distributed from there to any number of individual budget items.
Now, knowing that the semi-annual insurance premiums are accumulating at just the right pace, you can tell at a glance whether or not there is enough money in the equipment capital budget to go out and purchase what you have been thinking about!
