The Safe Income Rollover System (also known as Income Holdover) is designed to help you smooth out irregular income timing or plan and budget ahead. For example, if you receive a salary late in a month (e.g., June 30th) but want to use it for next month's (July's) budget envelopes, you can roll that income forward.
How it works
Income rollovers function as a non-mutating projection layer. This means they adjust your budgeting numbers without altering the underlying ledger transactions.
Key Rules
- No Ledger Mutation: The dates, amounts, and descriptions of your transactions remain unchanged.
- Forward-Only: Income can only be rolled forward to subsequent months (up to 3 months ahead), never backward or into the same month.
- Transactional Locking: Every rollover request is protected by row-level locking to prevent concurrent requests from double-allocating the same transaction amount.
- Soft-Delete Cascade: When a source transaction is deleted, its associated rollovers are marked as
cancelled(soft-deleted) for auditable history.
How to Roll Income Forward
- Navigate to the Budgets page.
- In the Income Allocation & Rollovers panel, locate the realized income transaction you want to roll forward.
- Click the Roll Forward button next to the transaction.
- Select the Target Month (e.g., next month), enter the Amount to Roll, and optionally write a note (e.g., "Salary received late").
- Click Confirm Rollover. The amount will immediately be subtracted from the source month's Ready-to-Assign pool and added to the destination month's pool.
Limitations
- You can only roll forward up to the total realized amount of the source transaction. If you have already rolled forward part of the transaction, the available amount to roll is reduced.
- Overrides are excluded from month-close ledger fingerprinting to ensure that freezing historical months does not drift or break when rollovers are modified or cancelled.
Common Questions
Why can't I roll income backward to a previous month?
Income rollovers are strictly chronologically forward-only. Budgeting relies on past income being settled, so you can only roll income from its original transaction month into the next month or subsequent future months.
Does rolling income forward modify my bank transactions?
No. The Safe Income Rollover System is a pure budgeting/projection layer. It never alters your transaction dates, amounts, or database ledger records.
What happens if I delete a transaction that has an active rollover?
If the source income transaction is deleted or cancelled, all active rollovers linked to that transaction are automatically set to 'cancelled' status to preserve financial auditability and prevent over-allocation.