Home → Investments →

If we want to track our annual RRSP and TFSA Limits (Canada) how can we do that within Moneydance?

• Edit

Maurice Palfy

27 Jan, 2024 11:30 PM

I cannot find a way to track my annual RRSP and TFSA contribution limits? If we could assign categories to Investments, we could then create budgets to track them or is there a better way?

1. 1 Posted by dwg on 28 Jan, 2024 04:19 AM

   

   The budget system is basically about monitoring spending using the categories that are assigned to each transaction. The system cannot monitor an account, accounts themselves are at a different level.

   I'll make the assumption that the contributions are being made as a transfer from a banking type of account to the investment account and as such are not reflected in a budget as it is a transfer from one asset to another.

   This does not mean that we cannot monitor these transactions just we have to do it in a different way.

   A transfer is a single transaction, what can be done is to make it into two transactions.

   The method presented here can be used to budget a variety of transactions, plus it minimizes the number of transactions in your register. This is not the only way of doing it.

   This example is using a loan repayment.

   Essentially you set up a budget category for each type of transfer that you want to include in your budget plus a single contra category to offset the amount. You post entries to these for each loan payment you make or transfer you which to budget for, for example regular planned savings.

   This method also keeps the transactions isolated in one set of entries, so it is relatively compact, the steps involved are:

       1. Create an expense category with a unique name for the transfer or loan payment you want to include in your budget.
       2. Create another expense category to act as the contra which you will use as an offset, you may even name it "Contra" but you can call it anything that makes sense to you.
       3. Add your new budget category to your budget.
       4. Now when you enter the transfer transaction, click on the split option in the category field, and add two additional splits. These will be in addition to the normal account transfer category which just shows the account receiving the funds which will be listed first. In the first extra transaction split just repeat the amount of the transfer with the new unique transfer category then in the second extra transaction split use the "Contra" category to offset the extra amount you added.

   Now the transaction will show the transfer that you need and the budget will capture the activity from the expense category you added. You can memorize the transaction with the splits and just set it up as a reminder so you do not have to repeat the process. The reason for using two expense categories is that they will offset each other so that the overall expense are not overstated since the budget categories will cancel each other and give a net zero amount is zero within the greater account set.

   The transactions will look like:

   • UGBSCFB001_Budget_Splits_for_Cash_Flow_Budgeting.png 33.3 KB
   • Edit

2. System closed this discussion on 28 Apr, 2024 04:20 AM.