What is a Section?

A Section is a chapter of a Budget: a named container that groups Cost Items and can hold further Sections nested inside it, each with its own running subtotal. It's what lets you split a Budget into prep, shoot and wrap, or into a funder's own chapter structure, instead of working one long flat list of lines.

What it's for

A Section breaks a Budget into chapters you can read at a glance, each carrying a subtotal that rolls up into whatever Section, or the Budget itself, contains it.

How it works

You add a Section with the + button in the sidebar Sections tab, or the Add Section button on an empty budget. It lands as a new Section at the end of the top level, and you nest it by dragging it inside another Section.

A Section closes with a footer row that repeats its name and shows its own total, a plain sum of everything underneath, which rolls up into whatever contains it. Within any one parent, a Section's own Sections sit above its own Cost Items, so a chapter's subsections always come before its own lines.

Sections are the middle layer between a Budget and its Cost Items, and other parts of Splinde read them directly. You can point a numeric field elsewhere in the Budget at a Section by typing @ and picking it from the Sections tab. What comes back is the Section's total including its AddOns, not only the base sum of its lines. Smart Subtotals reads across Sections rather than replacing them, and a Budget Block's Cost Overview shows one row per Section with its total, the same rollup you see in the editor.

Once a Budget has scenarios, a Section's name belongs to Main: rename it there, and every scenario's copy shows the same name.