How to include Annual Mandatory Expenses in monthly "Cost-of-Living Report"

[gtdforward]

Hello everyone! I’d like to ask for some guidance. I want to know whether Firefly would work for a situation that I haven’t been able to solve in other finance apps I’ve tested.

I’d like to estimate my real “cost of living” by analyzing my expenses. However, I run into a problem when it comes to mandatory annual expenses, such as yearly taxes.
In zero-budget apps (I know that Firefly uses a different methodology), for example, I would set aside the total amount divided by 12 in a specific category, but that amount doesn’t show up in the charts/reports. So, to know how much money I actually “spent” in a month — and therefore how much I truly saved — I need to manually add up the month’s expenses plus the amounts allocated to each annual-expense category.

In Firefly, if I used the approach of setting aside in a budget the amount divided by 12 and transferring it monthly from an asset account to a piggy bank, would that show up in the reports as an expense? If not, is there any report that can display this automatically?

Sorry for the lack of knowledge, I’m a beginner in this area and trying to improve.
Thank you very much in advance to everyone who can offer ideas!

[JC5]

Hey, thanks for starting this discussion.

That's an issue indeed, I have no real solution in Firefly III right now. I use yearly budgets and ditto overviews, but the yearly expenses get lost in the month-to-month.

Cheers,
James