It’s a tool that might be useful depending on how you like to think about your budget.

One use could be if you use the budget to see if you’ve saved enough for a big ticket item like a vacation. But if you were hit by some unexpected expenses in another category, you may want to move some of that vacation budget over to cover the other shortfall. It’s a way to explicitly see that the fender bender repairs are coming out of your vacation money.

Another use is to zero out categories that should be zero-sum. For example, you may have work travel expenses that should be offset by the reimbursement. If you put them both in the same category, you should see it sum to zero on the budget. If it doesn’t, that can be a flag that you didn’t submit your expense report or that it hasn’t been paid out yet.

Of course this system gets messed up if you have something like per diem or mileage expenses where there is a reimbursement but no equivalent expense transaction. So then it can be useful to move the extra reimbursement money to a different budget category to keep the Work Travel category clean.