You have two options for recording your credit cards. The first is to simply enter it as a new Bill and enter the account that it will be paid from. The second and probably more effective way is to create a Credit Card Account from the My Accounts page. If you think about a real world situation, most likely you’ll be paying a credit card Bill from your checking account. In essence, this is like transfering money from a positive balanced account to a debt account. Therefore, you have the option to create a transfer on the My Bills page to transfer money from your checking to credit card account. To do so, select your checking account as the paid from. Then click the paid to checkbox and choose your credit card account. Next enter an estimate amount that you want to pay each month to pay down your credit card. When the date is due to make the payment, login to BudgetTracker, select My Bills, and choose the “record bill” link. You’ll then be taken to a transfer page where you can specify the exact amount you paid. Once you hit record, this will be tracked for you on many parts of the site. Below is a list of pages that will be effected when recording a Bill payment:

  • My Calendar – Notice that when you create a Bill, you’ll also have a Bill entry on the days your Bill is due with a red background on the My Calendar page. Once a bill is marked paid, you will see a line through your calendar entry showing that the Bill has been paid.
  • My Bills – On the My Bills page, when a Bill has been paid, instead of showing “record payment”, you’ll see a “Paid” link in bold instead. Clicking on this will take you  to the transaction that is tied to the payement made. If you pay less than the estimated amount you entered for that Bill, you’ll have the option to either mark the bill as paid, transfer the remaining amount to the following recurrence payment, or make the remaining payment at a later time.
  • My Budget – When you created the bill, you were given an option to choose the category and tie it to a Budget. If you selected the checkbox “tie to Budget”, you will see a red box to the left of the category you chose on the My Budget page. Additionally the amount of that Budget will be dynamically calculated based on the amount of your Bill for the month. When you record a bill payment by entering a transaction, this will show up in the amount spent column on the My Budget page and will be calculated against your total budget amount. If you leave the “tie to budget” checkbox unchecked, your bill payment will still show up as amount paid on the My Budget page but your total budget amount for that bill can be entered manually by clicking the category name on the My Budget page. Remember that the date you entered the bill payment must fall withing the Budget month you’re viewing.
  • My Transactions – When a bill has been recorded, a Transaction has been entered to tie in with a paid Bill. The transaction entered will show up here on the My Transactions page under the account you have chosen. If it is a paid bill, you’ll see a red box B next to the transaction that is tied to that Bill. If you delete the transaction, you’re also marking the Bill unpaid.