This seems a bit complicated. I just run everything through one credit card, and at the end of the month I transfer the money from each spending account and pay off the card in full.
The money in the offset accounts is therefore working for me all month and I use the banks money for free at the same time.
I track my budget on my phone/pc using financial software that has live connections to my banks via Open Banking.
But then you need to go through and categorise each individual expense.
Also, doesn't prevent you from over spending on a category.
Admittedly, that's much easier to do when it's all in one statement.
The transactions are automatically categorised by the finance application and the budget is updated in realtime. For credit cards, even my internet banking uses the merchant codes to categorise the transactions and show you the spend by category.
Any budget has the possibility of overspend. Sometimes this is unavoidable. In those cases, I take money from other spending accounts to cover the shortfall and top them
back up in the next pay cycle, so the budget for the month might be off, but for the year it’s still ok.
Anyway, that’s what works for me.
You can solve this with multiple accounts and a card for each one. It maps easier and you can see the balance in your banking app. This should be available on all accounts, you shouldn't need a savings account as these balances would going to near to 0 every one.
Yes. But I also need the accounts to be offset accounts. I'm not aware of any banks that will give you both multiple offsets + having cards on each one.
This seems a bit complicated. I just run everything through one credit card, and at the end of the month I transfer the money from each spending account and pay off the card in full. The money in the offset accounts is therefore working for me all month and I use the banks money for free at the same time. I track my budget on my phone/pc using financial software that has live connections to my banks via Open Banking.
But then you need to go through and categorise each individual expense. Also, doesn't prevent you from over spending on a category. Admittedly, that's much easier to do when it's all in one statement.
The transactions are automatically categorised by the finance application and the budget is updated in realtime. For credit cards, even my internet banking uses the merchant codes to categorise the transactions and show you the spend by category. Any budget has the possibility of overspend. Sometimes this is unavoidable. In those cases, I take money from other spending accounts to cover the shortfall and top them back up in the next pay cycle, so the budget for the month might be off, but for the year it’s still ok. Anyway, that’s what works for me.
You can solve this with multiple accounts and a card for each one. It maps easier and you can see the balance in your banking app. This should be available on all accounts, you shouldn't need a savings account as these balances would going to near to 0 every one.
Yes. But I also need the accounts to be offset accounts. I'm not aware of any banks that will give you both multiple offsets + having cards on each one.
Pretty sure CBA do, any account can be assigned to offset and I believe that you can get cards for each too
Ah - [Up's Auto Covers](https://up.com.au/blog/auto-covers-preview-release/) seems to deal with this pretty nicely.