Credit cards, without counting spending twice

Add a credit card as an account and it creates an envelope for itself in a category called Credit Card Payments: Northgate Visa payment. That envelope holds only one thing: money set aside to pay the card. Purchases are not filed there. Purchases are filed into Groceries, Gas, Dining out, and the other envelopes they belong to.

Maya buys $140 of groceries on the Visa. The row is filed to Groceries, so Groceries goes down by $140 and, because the card was used, $140 moves from Groceries to the Visa's payment envelope. Groceries paid for the food. The payment envelope now holds the cash to pay the bank for it. Nothing was counted twice, and nothing will be counted again when the card is paid.

This works exactly when Groceries had the money. If Groceries was already empty, the purchase is overspending (Groceries turns red), and the payment envelope is short by the same amount. When you cover the overspending, the money goes where the bill is: Groceries goes back to zero, and the covered amount moves into the Visa's payment envelope. That way the card shows you the truth on the day you spend, not weeks later on the statement. On the budget, money set aside for card purchases shows as the payment envelope's activity, not as something you assigned.

On the 28th, chequing pays the Visa what its envelope holds: $2,394.15, if nothing else is bought before then. That is a transfer: one transaction leaves chequing, one arrives on the card, and the payment envelope goes down by the same amount. Ready to assign does not change, and no envelope other than the payment envelope changes. What the card still owes after that, $1,315.90, is debt from before the Reyes household started using Mintro. It stays owed until money is assigned to the payment envelope for it. They assign $300 a month, and the guide on getting out of debt explains that plan.

Cashflow draws a card differently from a bank account. For chequing, the chart shows the money in the account going up and down. For a card, it shows the amount owed, which goes up with purchases and down with payments, with a marker at the card's limit. The Reyes Visa has a $12,000 limit, and the chart shows how close to it the card gets: with no payment scheduled, what they owe on the Visa climbs from $3,710.05 to $8,288.87 by January 28, still under the limit. Schedule the payment, and the drop appears on the 28th.