Definitions

Budget: Amounts defined for each category and expenses charged against a category. Budget is defined on a monthly basis. The budget will reset at the beginning of each month.
Family: A collection of individuals drawn from your contacts who share a collective budget.
Category: A type of expense, such as 'Groceries' or 'Rent'.
Expense: A charge against a category.
Fixed and Flexible Expense: A fixed expense is charged automatically against the budget at the beginning of each month. A common example of a fixed expense is 'Rent' or 'Mortgage'. A flexible expense may occur many times during a budget cycle, and is variable in amount. A common example of a flexible expense is a dining expense.
Budget Snapshot: Family Budget shows a bar graph of the status of each flexible category. The bar heights are relative to 100%. So a category whose expenses have exhausted half the budget for that category will show a bar height of 50%. A category that has more expenses charged against it than is budgeted will show a red bar extending below the baseline.
Synchronize: Family Budget is designed to allow multiple family members to share a collective budget. To be effective, budget data defined by other family members and expenses entered by other family members need to be loaded by each iPhone/iPod device. The act of collecting other family members budget data is called 'Synchronizing'. Synchronizing works by storing family budget data on a central server where it is available to all family members. Touching the 'Synchronize' button will send budget changes up to the server, and collect changes made by other family members.
Account: Source of funds for expense. Account examples are 'Cash', 'Debit', Credit Card.

Documentation

Setting up the Family Budget

Family Budget starts with 11 predefined categories. Most users will delete and add categories as needed. Touch the 'Categories' tab at the bottom of the screen to view the currently defined categories and amounts. To add a category, touch the '+' button at the top right. Enter the title, description, and budget amount. If you want Family Budget to automatically charge a single expense against the category at the beginning of each month, touch the 'Fixed Expense' control to mark the category as a fixed expense.

To delete a category, touch the 'Edit' button at the top left, and then touch the '-' button to the left of the category to be deleted. Drag the category using the 'ribbed' button on the right of each category to reorder.

At any point, touch the 'Expenses' tab at the bottom of the screen and then the 'Synchronize' button to store your budget settings to the server. This makes your changes available to other family members.

Adding Expenses

Touch the 'Add Expense' button on the 'Expenses' view to add an expense. A new view will appear that will allow you to enter the amount, set the date, cateogry, account, and note.

Viewing Expenses

The easiest way to view expenses is to touch the 'Family' tab, and then touch a family member name to see expenses entered by that family member. You may edit the expense information or delete the expense.

Setting up Accounts

You can add or edit an Account while you enter an expense. Accounts represent the source of the funds used for expenses. Accounts are particularly important when exporting the budget information to another program, such as Quicken (feature coming soon).

You may add any number of accounts. Set the most used account as the default to make entering an expense even less trouble.

Mark an account as 'My Account' to have the account viewable only by you. This helps reduce clutter for other family members who do not use the account.