Notes on my Plain Text Accounting methods

I'm trying to use a kakeibo-esque method (which is to say, envelope budgeting) with budgeting goals. Some people have written up good explanations on how to use PTA with budgeting, although I wanted to make some of my own tweaks, so they're recorded here for posterity as I figure them out.

PTA uses double-entry accounting, which means you need to log where the money came from and where it's getting moved to. Generally, budgeting methods create sub-accounts using colons (so, like checking:envelope:groceries) since sub-categories get logged as part of the account total (so it doesn't suddenly look like your account is empty when it has all that money in it)

General approach: assign money to envelopes, and then create expense accounts like "expenses:groceries" to move the money into so we can track spending. The struggle here is wrt wanting to budget for money that will come in later in the month if on a monthly salary cycle or billing freelance irregularly (maybe this means I should bill accounts receivable on an actual cycle lol)

Possibly a solution is to create an "expected income" category that we withdraw money from to put it in the negative to fund the main account, and then income goes in there to zero it out?