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Estimates and pauses

Mark uncertain amounts honestly and pause items that should not count in the forecast for now.

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The item forms offer two useful switches: one marks an amount as uncertain, while the other removes an item from the calculation for now. They answer different questions, and choosing the right one keeps the forecast honest and complete.

“Amount is an estimate”

Some figures are contracts and some are guesses. A rent is €1,220. Electricity is “about €99, we shall see”. Marking the second as an estimate does not change what Ebbe counts — the full €99 goes into the projection — it changes what the projection claims.

Where it shows up:

  • A ≈ beside the amount in the item lists.
  • A ≈ on any month in the forecast that contains at least one estimated payment.

That second one is the useful part. A month marked with ≈ is a month whose figure has soft edges; a month without one is made entirely of amounts somebody has committed to. When a forecast says you go under your buffer in November, it matters a great deal whether November is built from contracts or from guesses.

Good candidates: electricity, water, fuel, groceries, anything metered, and any repair you have not had quoted. Bad candidates: rent, insurance, subscriptions, loan instalments — marking a fixed cost as an estimate spreads doubt over a month that does not deserve it.

Estimates are not a range and not a margin. Ebbe has one number per payment; the mark says how much weight to put on it.

“Paused”

A paused item produces no payments at all. Not a zero — nothing. It is not in the forecast, not in the totals, not in the analysis.

It is for something that is genuinely suspended but is coming back, or might: a streaming subscription you have frozen for the winter, a savings transfer you have stopped while a repair is being paid off, a gym membership on hold.

The alternative — deleting it — loses the amount, the rhythm, the category and the tags, all of which you would have to type again. Pausing keeps the item whole and takes it out of the sums.

Where it shows up:

  • A “paused” badge on the row.
  • The item lists hide paused items by default; a Show paused switch brings them back.
  • The analysis screen leaves them out of the shares and the ranking, and says so, with its own switch to include them.

Two things pausing does not do. It does not backdate: a paused item’s past payments are gone from the projection too, not just its future ones — pausing is not the same as setting an end date. And a paused item still counts against the 500-item ceiling, because it is still an item.

When to use which

The situation The answer
I do not know the exact amount Estimate
The amount is right but it is not being paid at the moment Pause
It has stopped for good An end date, so the past stays true
It has not started yet A start date in the future
I entered it twice Delete one

The last three are worth stressing. An item that ended is not a paused item: an end date keeps its history, so the months it really was paid still show it, while pausing removes it from those months too. And something that starts later — a pay rise, a lease beginning in spring — is an ordinary item with a future start date, not something to be added later and remembered in the meantime.