Hmm, will have to sit over this. IMO it will only complicate the usage/design of Buddy to have different categories in the income especially if they dont match up to the categories in the budget/expense. I would say just keep income as a single entity and can be defined per period. So something like this Income 01Jan2010 - 31Dec2010 £40000 Income 01Jan2011 - 31Jul2011 £25000 Income 01Aug2011 - 31Dec2011 £20000 then one can define bugdets like this food 01Jan2010-31Dec2010 allocated: £200 max: £300 gas 01Jan2010-31Dec2010 allocated: £100 max: £120 if your expense for food or gas goes above the allocated then we extract funds from the income and increase this budget till the max or till the income becomes zero. Once the budget reaches max there will be no more allocation and any further expense wil be overspending. how does that sound ? again these are just quick thoughts, might need to have a deeper understanding because I remember how much it took to make buddy generic suited to most usecases. thanks for the valuable inputs. Its been a nice discussion.