Introduction
iFreeBudget is free, open-source expense tracking and budget application for Android platform. A full featured desktop version is also available.
Accounts and Categories:
Accounts are maintained in a hierarchy similar to a file system folder structure. Category is similar to a folder and an account is analogous to a file.
There are four base categories:
- Assets
- Income
- Expense
- Liabilities
Assets category will contain all accounts that contribute positively to personal equity. Examples are checking accounts, savings accounts etc.
Income category will contain all income accounts like Payroll, Interest earned, Dividends etc.
Expense category will contain all expense accounts like bills, purchases, personal expenses etc.
Liabilities category will contain all accounts that contribute negatively to personal equity. Examples are credit cards, loans, mortgages.
Accounts and categories can be created under any of the top level categories. Categories can also be nested under other categories. Accounts are created within categories. This provides flexibility in organizing accounts.
For example expenses can be organized as shown:
Category - Expense
Category - Auto expenses
Category - Gas
Account - Honda
Account – Toyota
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| Accounts are identified by this icon. |
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| Categories are identified by this icon |
Transactions
A transaction is transfer of funds from one account to another. There are always two components to a transaction, a source account and a destination account. Transactions can be categorized by types (income, expense, transfer).
For recording an income, the source account is always one of the accounts under Income category or its children and the destinations is always one of the accounts under “Asset” category or its children.
For recording an expense, the source account is always one of the accounts under “Asset” or “Liability” category or its children and the destinations is always one of the accounts under “Expense” category or its children.
All other types of transactions can be recorded using the “Transfer” type. For this type there is no restriction on source and destination accounts.
Viewing transactions
Click on "Transactions" icon on the main screen.
Budgets
A Budget is a grouping of accounts. Budgets are of type weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and accounts in the budged are allocated amounts, which is the amount you want to spend on the specified account for the specified time period.
Click on "Budgets" icon on the main screen and then click on "+" icon on top of the screen to create a new budget. Give a name for the budget and select accounts you want to include in the budget by tapping the account in the list and entering the allocated amount for that account.
Cash flow report
Cash flow report shows a normalized view of all transactions for a specified time period. Report can be viewed for a weekly or monthly range.
Backups
You can backup the existing data to the SD card on the device. Click "Backup" icon on the main screen and click on "+" icon on top of the screen to backup the current data.
The backups screen shows a list of previously saved backups. Each entry in the list is identified as a date-time value, which is the time at which the backup was created. Long click on an item in the list to bring up the context menu for each backup.
"Use this backup" selection will replace the current data with the backed up version.
"Delete" will remove the backup from the SD card.
