The "needed for spending" doesn’t take activity into account, it only looks at the budgeted money. By moving money out again you take away that money.

• One solution would be to have the payments go straight to "ready to assign" instead (although this screws with your history a bit by making it look like you’re spending all that yourself)
• Or you could change the budget goal to the amount that you pay yourself and let the family transactions fill up the rest. This is what I’m doing, but it has the downside of not having enough if the payments don’t come. If you fill up the first month yourself and let the payments pre-fill for the next this should probably be fine though.

Maybe someone else (or the YNAB support) has a better solution for this, but afaik that’s the only thing you can do.

(pictures aren't loading for me, so i'm guessing a bit)

it sounds like you've created a 'funding target' goal rather than a 'needed for spending' goal. The first one tracks how much you have assigned this month, while the second tracks the account balance,

Ooh, I have a system for exactly this that works very well for me!

I set up a category called "To Be Reimbursed", with a no-date goal of $500. The aim for this category is to be at $500 minus whatever people owe me. To give you an example using your numbers and this system:

In your cellphone plan category, set a goal for $79.96 ($199.90/5*2 (since you cover two portions of the 5)). If your other members pay in advance, put the money in the To Be Reimbursed category (now it would $500 + the money they send you). When the bill comes in, you split it so the $79.96 comes out of your cellphone plan category and the other portion comes out of To Be Reimbursed.

This system is great because, if they pay late, it won't affect your budget at all since you have the buffer. Also, as a nice extra thing, when someone pays me back for something, I add green flags to both the repayment and the transaction they are paying me back for so I can quickly see who still owes me.

Hope this helps!

• Make sure the goal is the "needed for spending" type goal
• Assign the incoming payments from family members against the cellphone category
• If those payments have arrived and they are marked as cleared, then the goal should be green as incoming counts as spendable money. If those payments are in the future, they won't be counted. Future can be tomorrow, or after the payment is taken, it doesn't matter. If the money isn't in your account it does not count.

Easist way of doing this, assign the full amount and let the excess rollover to the next month. Then from that next month you'll only ever need to budget your share, as you'll be constantly rolling their payments to you.