Planning a holiday with a tag

Bring travel payments from several categories together under one tag and compare them with a target.

A holiday usually spans several payments and categories: flights in March, a deposit in May, the remaining accommodation cost in July, insurance, and a rental car. The dates and categories should stay accurate, while one shared tag brings the whole plan together for you.

Enter the parts

Add each payment as a one-off item, with its real date and its real category. Do not lump them into one item dated “summer” — the point of the forecast is knowing which month each leaves the account, and a €4,000 lump in July says something false about May.

Where a payment is split unevenly — a deposit now, the balance later — use Enter each payment rather than an even split.

Where you are guessing — the rental car, the spending money — mark it as an estimate. It still counts in full; it just tells you which months of your forecast have soft edges.

Give them all the same tag

In each item’s tag field, type the same thing: Summer trip.

You do not create the tag first. Typing it onto the first item is what brings it into existence, and typing it onto the others is what gathers them. Case and spacing do not matter — Summer trip, summer trip and SUMMER TRIP all become summer-trip, and the field shows you that as you type.

An item can carry more than one tag. A diving course on the holiday is plausibly both summer-trip and sport, and it will count under both.

Set a budget

Open the tag — click it on any item, or find it in Settings → Categories & tags — and give it an amount.

Choose the period Total, because a holiday is a finite thing with a whole cost. The bar on the tag page and on the analysis screen then fills as you add payments, and turns red if the plan goes past what you meant to spend.

The trap worth knowing: a total budget excludes anything open-ended. If you tag a monthly subscription with summer-trip, it has no total to contribute and the figure will look lower than you expect. Keep open-ended things out of a total-budgeted tag, or use a per-month period instead. See tag budget periods.

Watch it

Two places tell you where you stand.

The tag’s own page shows what it has cost, what is still to come, the progress against the budget, and a breakdown by category — which is the view that answers “where did four thousand euros go”.

The forecast has a chip for the tag above the chart. Press it and those items come out of the projection, and a faint second line shows the balance without them. That is the honest version of “can we afford this”: not a percentage, but the actual shape of your year with the holiday and without it.

When it is over

Nothing to do. Once every payment under the tag is in the past and nothing under it is open-ended, Ebbe marks the tag finished and hides it behind the Show past switch on the analysis screen.

Much later, pruning will clear the payments away without changing the forecast, and will offer to remove the tag’s settings once nothing carries it any more.