Credit Card payments are a bit tricky to track in your budget. On one hand, you’re paying down a debt similar to your house payment so it counts towards increasing your net worth but on the other hand, if you’re making monthly payments, this feels more like an expense that you want to budget for.
In BudgetTracker, since we treat Credit Cards like a loan having their own account, we suggest transferring money from your Checking Account to your Credit Card account. One of the issues you’ll run into with this is setting a category for both the deposit and withdrawal portion of the transfer. Since they’re pretty much the same category (credit card transfer), lots of users will wonder why their budget expenses for the month are 0. This usually happens when you select the same budget category for the withdrawal and deposit portion of the transfer since they’re cancelling each other out. If you’re going to treat your credit card payments as an expense to be deducted from your budget, then you’ll only want to set a budget category on the withdrawal portion and not the deposit portion. We set this up for you by default.
If you don’t want to treat the payments as an expense and you won’t be paying off the monthly balance, the problem comes up if you’re trying to see how much you’ll have left once all your expenses have been paid when viewing the My Budget page. One option to manage your budget this way is to treat it similar to sending money to your 401k from the My Income page. When splitting your income, if you set it up to also transfer money to your credit card account, this will help it get tracked on the My Budget page so you know how much money is left at the end of the month.
Another option is to not setup a credit card account and only track the money leaving your checking account. For some users, this route might be easier but we try to make it flexible enough to accomidate most users needs.