[Bug]: Spent/Balance Column Totals

[Bsmith85282]

Verified issue does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

What happened?

The Issue: In the tracking budget with roll over - columns don't seem to add up correctly. Even after reading the documentation found at https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/tracking-budget/ - under "How Money Rolls Over" It doesn't make sense that money in a rollover row from the "Budgeted" column would move to the 'Spent" column (shown in RED), and money in the spent column doesn't go towards spent totals (GREEN). Budgeted non roll over seems to work normally (YELLOW).

This also affects the "Balance" Column (no color).

I would expect each Column to total everything in that column. If looking at picture attached I would expect Budgeted to total up to 450.00 and Spent to total up to -23.81 and the balance column should add the two:
450 [Budgeted] + (-23.81) [Spent] = 426.19 [Balance]

Note I Cannot select more than one OS in the drop down but had this on both Mac OSX and Windows 11 Safari/Brave Respectively. This issue does not appear to be present on GitHub however, I did post in discord.

How can we reproduce the issue?

1. Switch to Tracking Budget
2. Have 2 or more rows
3. assign a rollover balance to a row (positive or negative)
4. In the row with the rollover balance add values to the "spent" and "Budgeted" columns
5. Cry a little

Where are you hosting Actual?

Docker

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Chrome, Safari

Operating System

Windows 11

[youngcw]

Are there any categories that you stopped carrying forward in that shown month?

It will be a lot easier to confirm and try to fix anything if you can upload an example file. It can be a demo file.

[Bsmith85282]

There was nothing that I stopped carrying over - everything with the -> by it was set to rollover.

I will try to upload a file later today for you!

[youngcw]

Are you going to upload an example budget? If not Ill close this ticket.

[youngcw]

One thing you can maybe try is to change to envelope budget then change back to a tracking budget. For some reason that fixed someone else's spent total issues.

[arekmano]

Chiming in as this is indeed occurring out in the wild. I've set up a minimal PoC here, to demonstrate the issue

1. 100$ budget, 100$ spent , no rollover. Expenses and savings are as expected

2. 100$ budget, 100$ spent, rolled over to the following month. Expense disappears. Its as if I never spent that money

@youngcw. What am I doing wrong here? Alternatively, what additional information would you need to track down the potential bug?

I've included the sample PoC budget in this comment

2025-02-04-My Finances 1.zip

[Thafar]

I see the same behavior as @Bsmith85282, the spent for a rollover category in a tracking budget seems broken:

It seems that the rollover behavior in a tracking budget is primarily based on changes in balance:

• Negative changes in balance do not count towards expenses/spent
• Positive changes in balance do count towards expenses/spent

Not sure what is the reasoning behind this, but in my opinion it gives very unexpected behavior:

In the example below, I paid $100 twice and received $100 twice. So I spent/saved nothing.
Besides that, I budgeted $50 in October.
Now the overview tells me I saved $250 since my balance got increased by $150 in October and $100 in December.

In my opinion, rollover categories should either:

• Always count towards expenses, but then use the "spent" column and not the "balance" column
• Never count towards expenses, but in the month that rollover spending stops it should use the sum of all the "spent" columns that rolled over into that month

Interested to hear how others see this.

[Mpic]

This seems related to #4321, and I can't make sense of the current behavior either :-/
I really would like to be able to use the tracking mode, but this needs clarification or fixing :-/