A budget in Nauticare is set per month and split by category. Each month of a year gets its own set of budget lines — one line per top-level category, with an amount — and Nauticare compares those amounts against the expenses actually recorded for the same month and category.
The year view
Finance → Budgets opens on the current year. The line at the top reads how much has been spent of the year's total budget, and a year selector below it moves between years.
Under that are twelve cards, one per month, each showing:
- The month's total budgeted amount.
- How many categories it covers.
- The percentage utilised — spending against budget, capped at 100%.
The card for the current calendar month is marked Current Month. Clicking any card opens that month.
A month's budget
The month page is titled with the month and year and offers Back to months. It shows the month's total and how many categories it covers, then the budget lines themselves. On a wide screen a toggle switches between Cards and Table; on a phone the cards are always used.
Each line shows the category, its budgeted amount and the percentage utilised, worked out from the expenses booked to that category in that month.
Setting and changing budget lines
Add New Category opens a small form with:
- Category Name — one of the vessel's top-level budget categories. Only categories that do not already have a line this month are offered.
- Budget amount — zero or greater.
Editing an existing line keeps the category fixed and lets you change the amount. Deleting a line removes that category from the month's budget. All three actions need the Budgets → Edit permission; without it the month page is read-only.
Budgets are set per month, so a figure entered for one month does not carry into the next.
How spend is measured
Spending comes from the expenses recorded in Finance → Expenses: each expense's total in the vessel currency, counted into the month of its date and against its top-level category. Which subcategory an expense was filed under does not affect the comparison — everything under a category counts towards that category's budget line. Whether an expense is verified makes no difference to the figures either.
A month with no budget lines simply shows a budgeted amount of zero and 0% utilised; its spending still counts towards the year's total at the top of the page. Nothing stops spending exceeding a budget; the budget is a reference figure, not a limit.
Where the categories come from
The category list is the vessel's own budget category tree, maintained in Vessel Settings → Finance. Every vessel starts with a suggested set that you are free to rename, extend or prune. See Finance settings.