Jar Entries

• General Concepts
• Identifying Trade-Offs
• The Reserves Jar

General Concepts
Banzai uses Jars to help students segregate their money by purpose. Each time they spend money, they must identify the jar(s) from which it will be taken. Jar entries must balance account entries. If a student reports that he spent $5.00 from his checking account, he must also take $5.00 from one or more of his jars.

 

 
In this example, the student used her checking account to pay $14.65 for a meal at TGI Fridays. The student chose to take the money from her Eating Out jar. Each time students create a jar entry, Banzai will automatically fill in the amount necessary to fund the transaction, so long as their is a sufficient balance in the jar. As with account entries, clicking Add or pressing Enter records the jar entry.

 

 
Once the jar entry is recorded, you'll note that the Remaining amount is displayed as $0.00. This indicates that the jar entries and account entries are balanced. If a student attempts to save an imbalanced transaction, an error message will be displayed.

After finishing both jar and account entries, students should click Save to record the transaction. A confirmation message will appear if the save was successful.

Identifying Trade-Offs
Banzai will not generally permit a jar's balance to go below zero. If a student wishes to keep spending money in a particular area, she must identify a different jar from which to take the money. There isn't anything wrong with this–life is full of trade-offs, but students must recognize that spending more money in one area means spending less in another.

 
This student doesn't have enough in his Clothing jar to cover the purchase he made at American Eagle. As you can see, the jar only has a balance of $15.00. Attempting to fund the entire transaction from the Clothing jar will lead to this error message:

 

The student must decide what he is willing to have less of in order to afford more clothes. In this example, we'll take the remainder from his Eating Out jar.

 
Since the transaction is now balanced, the student can now save it successfully.

The Reserves Jar
The Reserves jar plays a special role in Banzai. It holds all funds that students haven't placed into other jars and functions as "jar of last resort" for emergencies. The Reserves jar is also the only jar in Banzai that can have a negative balance. This accommodates students who are in debt.

Students are welcome to make all of the trade-offs, of the sort we discussed above, the want. There isn't anything wrong with trading restaurant money for clothing money. Students are strongly discouraged, however, from spending money from their Reserves jar, except in emergency situations. To emphasize this principle, students will see a message when they spend money from Reserves:

Ideally, students will be adding to their Reserves balance each time they receive income while removing money from the jar only on rare occasions, ensuring that their emergency fund grows over time.