A number of issues may make the numbers in your budget appear too high or too low. You can do some general maintenance tasks to see if that clears up the problem. If it doesn't, specific individual problems and their solutions are listed below.

Categorize your transactions.

Click Categorize transactions in the left pane to view and categorize your uncategorized transactions in the last 30 days. To view all of the uncategorized transactions in your file, do the following:

Make sure your budget includes all the categories you use.

If you have recently started a new category but have not added it to your budget, do the following:

Check for large one-time purchase or income items that may throw off your budget.

If you want to exclude the purchase or income from your budget, go to the account register where the transaction occurred, right-click the transaction, and then click Exclude from Budget.

The income amount in the Planned column is what you entered when you set up the budget. If you made an estimate when you set up the budget, you may want to refer to your paystubs or income statements and edit the income number to reflect your real income.

Your expenses may also exceed your income if the percentage goals you've set exceed 100% of your income. By default, Money suggests percentages for each of your budget groups that add up to 100%. If you increase a budget group percentage, you must decrease another to keep your budget in balance. For example, you may determine that 60% of your gross income for Committed Expenses is not enough, and you increase it to 65%. If you do not decrease another budget group by 5%, your total expenses will add up to 105% of the income amount you entered.

Expand the Income budget group and verify that it includes all of the categories you use for income, including interest, bonuses, and any income from self-employment.

If you have income from a retirement or other investment account, make sure that you add the contributions from that account to the Income budget group.

If you transfer income from a business account to a personal account, add the business account to the Income budget group so that the budget will track the transfers.

This can occur if you have set up planned amounts based on your gross income but only track your net pay in Money.

For example, you may enter $5000 as your monthly gross income when you set up the budget. However, you may only net a total of $3000.00. If you are tracking net income in Money and not gross income, your income in the budget will always appear to have a shortfall of $2000.

This can also occur if you're simply saving or spending less than you planned. If you are saving less than you planned, you may want to increase your savings amount. If you are spending less than you planned, that's great news. If you want, you can decrease your planned amount for that budget group and increase your savings or debt reduction.

To learn more, see the related topics below.

The number in the Unallocated shows the amount of money you've planned for a budget group that you have not assigned to a particular category or account. For example, you may have allocated a total of $500 per month to the Fun Money budget group, which includes three categories: Dining Out, Entertainment and Hobbies/Leisure. You particularly want to track your spending on the Dining Out category so you enter a planned amount for Dining Out of $200. Now, the Unallocated line will show that $300.00 of the total you plan for Fun Money has not been allocated to individual categories.

You cannot edit or remove the Unallocated line. However, you can adjust your budget so that it shows a $0.00 amount by entering planned amounts for each of the items in your budget group or by reducing the total amount of your budget group so that it equals the total of the planned amounts you've set for any individual items in the budget group. For example, you can enter planned amounts of $150.00 for both Entertainment and Hobbies/Leisure so that the planned amounts for all three categories total $500. Or, you can reduce the total planned amount for the budget group to $200.

If you see a negative number or percentage, it means that the budget is tracking an account to which you are not making positive contributions. Often it's a savings account where the balance is decreasing on average every month, or a credit card account where the balance is increasing on average every month. You have to decide if you want to continue to track that account in the budget.

For example, if it's a credit card where the balance increases every month, you probably do want to plan to pay that card down, so you may want to continue to track that credit card account in the budget. But if you have a savings account that you are planning to close and the balance falls every month because you are slowly moving money out of it, then you probably don't need to track that account in the budget. To stop tracking the account, click the budget group that includes the account, click the account name, and then click Remove.

If you don't see an account listed in the Add Item wizard of the budget, it may be that the account setup is not complete. When you try to set up an account online, but have to interrupt the process for some reason (such as to contact the bank to get a user name and password), Money will show the account in your Account List. However, you cannot track contributions to the account until you complete online setup.

If you want to track contributions right away, click Create a new account in the left pane of the Working Budget page, and then create a new account to track. When you complete online setup, you can merge that account with your other account by clicking Merge accounts in the left pane of the Account List.