Cashflow Accounts

MoneyWell helps you manage your cash flow by dividing up your accounts into those used in your budgeting cash flow and those outside of it. Accounts designated to be in your cash flow require bucket assignments for all transactions that are not transfers between accounts. This allows MoneyWell to compare the total balance of all your buckets against the total of all your cash flow accounts. If the balances don't match, you have improperly assigned a bucket to a transaction. It's a nice crosscheck for your budgeting and is shown in the header of your Cash Flow view.

Choosing Cash Flow Accounts

Once you get a few basic rules down, it's easy to decide if an account belongs in your cash flow set. These should be marked as cash flow accounts:

• Checking/Current - A cash flow account because you spend from this account type.
• Savings - Typically in your cash flow so you can track long term savings in income buckets, but optionally can be excluded.
• Cash - A cash flow account used for pocket money.
• Credit Card (no balance) - Without a running balance, this deferred cash account should be in your cash flow.

These accounts should be excluded from cash flow:

• Credit Card (debt balance) - If you are getting charged interest on a balance, you should not be using this for cash flow until it's paid off.
• Loans/Line of Credit - Typically not in your cash flow because you're not spending from it, just paying down debt.
• Investment/Money Market - Rarely in your cash flow unless you treat it like savings for long term purchases.

As you can see, the question to ask is, "Will I be spending money from this account?" If the answer is "Yes" then the account should be in your cash flow. Spending money means you are assigning buckets, which means MoneyWell can track the balance of this account against your account balances.