Budget

A monthly plan per spending category, transactions with a date and an amount, and the deviation from plan — so you see overspending before the month is over.

A family or a small project that wants to plan spending by category and check it against actual spending without setting up accounting software.

These are examples, not the limit: your agent will build any data model your task needs.

What it is for

At the start of the month there seems to be plenty of money; by the end, nobody knows where it went. A banking app shows spending but does not compare it with what you meant to spend.

Here every category has a plan for the month, every purchase is recorded as a transaction, and the “Plan vs actual” table works out the actual and the deviation for each category automatically. The agent enters receipts from what you say and tells you where you are overspending.

How it looks in colabro

On the sample data the workspace is created with.

Transactions

Date	Amount	Category and month	What for
16.10.2026	85 €	Groceries · October 2026	Weekly grocery shop
14.10.2026	36,5 €	Eating out · October 2026	Lunches at work
12.10.2026	230,85 €	Groceries · October 2026	Two-week grocery shop and household supplies
11.10.2026	24,5 €	Transport · October 2026	Taxi from the station

and 5 more

“Transactions”: every purchase with its date, amount and category.

What the agent does

YouAdd a receipt: groceries, €85, today.
AgentCreates a transaction in the “Groceries” plan line for the current month.
ResultThe transaction is in the list; the actual and the deviation for “Groceries” updated automatically.
YouWhere am I overspending?
AgentAdds up the transactions per plan line, compares them with the plan and names where the plan was exceeded and by which purchases.
Result“Groceries” +€45, “Eating out” +€15 — and the largest transactions in each.
YouMake a November plan like October’s, but cut eating out to €50.
AgentCreates the month and plan lines for all categories, changes the “Eating out” amount.
ResultThe November plan is in the “Plan vs actual” table.

Ask your agent to make one

Copy the request and send it to your agent: it creates the workspace and fits it to you.

Create a colabro workspace “Budget” from the example budget: categories, a monthly plan, transactions and the deviation from plan. Fit the categories to my spending and ask me anything unclear all at once.

For the agent to do it, connect it to colabro: Connect an agent.

Use this example

You can create the workspace with sample data after you sign in; you will come back to this page.

What people usually adjust

Categories (category) are your own list: a family might have “Groceries”, “Kids”, “Health”; a project “Contractors”, “Subscriptions”, “Advertising”.
A new month is a month object with a code like 2026-11 plus plan lines for it; the agent can copy last month’s plan.
The example has no income: the actual of a plan line and “Spent” are expenses only. If you need income, add a required field kind to the type operation (enum: expense, income; set it on the transactions already entered) and a condition on the plan line’s actual "where": {"kind": "expense"}: income then counts neither in the actual nor in “Spent”, and a separate stat over transactions with filter="kind=income" shows its total. A separate “Income” category does not work: its actual is added to spending and would show up as overspending.
Transactions are linked to a plan line (“Groceries · October 2026”), so in “Transactions” you filter them by plan line, not by month or category separately. A month’s spending by category is in “Plan vs actual” with the month filter; the transactions of a line are there too, below the table.
If several people pay, add a “Paid by” field to transactions and a summary by it.
The amounts in the example are made up: delete them once you start entering your own.