Frequently asked questions

Each named envelope - Groceries, DIY, Tech - keeps a running tally of the money added to it and the spending taken out. In this app, balances carry forward across months, whether positive or negative. You can build up money for an occasional purchase, or let an unexpected repair take an envelope negative and rebuild it over time. Spending can follow real life without fitting neatly into calendar months.

Negative envelopes and running balances let your budget work over time. An A/C repair can take your DIY envelope negative, and future funding can gradually build it back up. Balances carry forward instead of resetting each month, so one person spending $100 a week on trinkets and another spending $1,000 once a quarter on a tech gadget can each track their own pattern. You can see how each envelope is doing over time without forcing every purchase into a monthly spending limit.

Neither positive nor negative balances reset at the month boundary. Leftover money keeps building up, and a negative balance stays visible until later funding or transfers cover it. Monthly Budget Amount controls how much is added each month; it is not a spending deadline or a reset. The envelope keeps the whole running tally.

An account is where your money physically is - a checking account, a credit card. An envelope is what your money is for. The same dollar sits in exactly one account and one envelope at the same time, including the Income and Sort Later envelopes. Accounts answer "where is it", envelopes answer "what is it for".

Total Balance adds up your accounts. Available adds up all active envelopes, including Income and Sort Later. Moving money from Income to another envelope does not change total Available, so it cannot fix a difference. Compare the account and envelope transaction lists for missing or incorrect entries. If the difference is still unexplained, email Justin for help; the help chat cannot inspect your numbers to diagnose it.

They are the two system envelopes, shown under System Envelopes at the bottom of the Envelopes page. They are created for you, cannot be renamed and cannot be deleted. Income is where money you receive lands and where monthly budget amounts are paid out from. Sort Later is a holding pen for transactions that have not been filed into a real envelope yet.

It is a staging area, and it is meant to end up empty. When an import cannot work out which envelope a transaction belongs in, it puts it in Sort Later so nothing is silently miscategorised. Open Sort Later from the Envelopes page and each row has a "Move to..." dropdown - pick the right envelope and the row leaves the list. Emptying it is the whole job.

Money coming in - a paycheque - is filed into Income. Each envelope that has a Monthly Budget Amount has that amount added from Income once a month. Income also keeps a running balance: if it is negative, more has gone out of it than has come in so far. That can reflect the timing of income and allocations; a negative balance alone does not tell you that your monthly budget exceeds your monthly income.

Three steps, in this order. First add your accounts under Accounts in the top menu, with their current balances. Then create envelopes under Envelopes for the things you actually spend on. Then bring your transactions in under Import, or add them by hand with the Add Transaction button. Do not try to build a perfect envelope list up front - five or six real categories beats twenty guesses.

Start with the bills you cannot skip - rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, any loan payment - then the everyday spending you want to keep an eye on, usually groceries, fuel and eating out. Add one for irregular costs like car repairs. You can add, rename and reorganise envelopes at any time, so it is much better to start small and adjust than to plan it all first.

Use your spending history over a period that includes the envelope's usual purchases. Everyday spending and an occasional gadget have different rhythms, so a single month's spending may not represent both. Monthly Budget Amount is the regular contribution to the running balance. It can build up toward a later purchase or rebuild a negative envelope after a larger expense. You can adjust it as you learn your spending pattern.

Accounts, Envelopes and Import on the left, then Settings and your name on the right. The name opens a small menu with Settings and Logout. On a phone the same three pages appear as icons next to the logo: a card for Accounts, an open envelope for Envelopes, and a page with an arrow for Import.

The Dashboard is the home page, reached by clicking the logo at the top left. It shows three figures - Total Balance across all accounts, Allocated, and Available - and shortcut cards to Accounts, Envelopes and Import.

There is a Video Tutorials link in the footer at the bottom of every page. It has a complete walkthrough plus short videos on getting a QFX file out of your bank, transferring between envelopes, and the AI Merchant Description feature.

Use the FAQ link in the footer. It has questions and answers grouped by topic; select a question to expand its answer. You can read it without signing in.

Click Accounts in the top menu, then the Add Account button at the top right. Give it a name, choose the account type, and enter the balance it has right now as the Initial Balance.

The balance the account has today, at the moment you add it. Everything you import or enter after that adjusts it from there.

The Add Transaction button on the Accounts page or the Envelopes page opens a box with three tabs. Expense/Income is the ordinary one: date, description, payee, amount, which account, which envelope. Amount is negative for money going out and positive for money coming in. The other two tabs are Account Transfer, for moving money between your own accounts, and Envelope Transfer, for moving money between envelopes.

The Transfer Between Accounts button on the Accounts page, or the Account Transfer tab of the Add Transaction box. A transfer between your own accounts is not spending, so it does not come out of any envelope.

Click an account on the Accounts page to open it, then click the transaction you want. The edit page has a delete option. To remove several at once, use the selection checkboxes on the account page and then Delete Selected.

Both the account page and the envelope page have a filter box above the list. Type any part of a payee, description, note, envelope or account name. Several terms separated by commas match any of them. A number matches an exact amount regardless of sign, so 28.88 finds both a charge and its refund.

It recalculates every account balance from the transactions underneath it. It is the thing to try if an account total looks wrong after a lot of edits or a deletion.

A credit card you owe money on shows a negative balance, because it is money you owe rather than money you have.

Envelopes in the top menu, then the Add Envelope button. You need a name; everything else is optional. Monthly Budget Amount is how much this envelope should be filled with each month. Category groups it with similar envelopes. Starting Balance puts money in it straight away, which creates a transfer from your Income envelope.

The amount added to this envelope once a month from your Income envelope. It adds to the existing running balance, including a negative balance; it does not reset the envelope to that amount or limit spending to that month. Leave it blank for an envelope you want to fund by hand instead.

Automatically, once the new month has arrived and you next sign in. The Envelopes page announces it when it happens - a note saying the envelopes were filled, and the tiles it touched count up to their new amounts.

Yes - the Extra Distribution button on the Envelopes page. Pick the date and it distributes every envelope's Monthly Budget Amount out of Income, exactly as the automatic monthly run would. It shows you the list of envelopes it is about to fill and the total first.

The Transfer Between Envelopes button on the Envelopes page. Choose the envelope to take from, the envelope to give to, and the amount. Doing this is not cheating - deciding on purpose that this month's car repair money is going to the dentist instead is exactly what the system is for. There is a short video on this in Video Tutorials.

A negative envelope means you spent more from it than it held, and it shows in red. Nothing is broken, and the app does not require you to cover it immediately. An A/C repair might take DIY to -$600; adding $200 a month would bring it back to zero after three fills if nothing else changes. You can let future funding rebuild it or use Transfer Between Envelopes if you want to cover it sooner. A negative envelope is a running budget balance, not a bank overdraft or extra cash.

The Create Group button on the Envelopes page makes a named group, and you can drag envelopes into it. Each group shows its own Budgeted and Available totals. An envelope's Category field does the same job from inside the envelope's own settings.

Open the envelope from the Envelopes page and use Edit Envelope. The two system envelopes, Income and Sort Later, cannot be renamed or deleted.

Yes. Open the envelope and use Export CSV, which downloads that envelope's transaction history.

It is what the envelope held immediately after that transaction, working back from today, so you can follow money building up, purchases taking it down, and a negative balance recovering over time. Sort Later has no running balance column, because a staging envelope walking down to zero says nothing useful.

Import in the top menu. Choose the file your bank gave you and press Upload and Parse File. You then confirm which account it belongs to, review what is about to be brought in, and confirm. Nothing is saved until you finish that review.

QFX, OFX and CSV. QFX is much the better choice where your bank offers it, because it carries the account's own identifiers and much cleaner payee names. There is a video in Video Tutorials showing how to find the QFX download at a bank.

Every bank puts it in a different place, usually somewhere near "download transactions", "export" or "Quicken". Video Tutorials has a walkthrough of finding it on a real bank site.

No. Duplicates are detected before anything is saved, and matching transactions are skipped. Re-importing a file that is entirely duplicates is a perfectly normal outcome and imports nothing.

Each row can be an Envelope Transaction - ordinary spending or income, filed into an envelope - or an Account Transfer, for money moving between two of your own accounts, or Don't Import to skip it. Envelopes are suggested from how you filed similar merchants before, so the suggestions get better the more you import.

Because there was not enough history to guess an envelope confidently. Open Sort Later on the Envelopes page and move each one with the "Move to..." dropdown. Do it for a month or two and the suggestions on future imports improve.

On the confirmation step you can pick the right account yourself. For a QFX file, the account identifiers in the file are then remembered, so later imports from the same bank account match automatically.

Check it really is a QFX, OFX or CSV file, and that it is under 1MB. A large date range is usually best split into a few smaller downloads.

It checks your account here against the statement your bank sent, so you can be confident nothing is missing or entered twice. Doing it once a month is what keeps the numbers trustworthy.

Open the account from the Accounts page and choose Reconcile. Enter the statement date and the closing balance printed on the statement, then continue. You get the list of transactions up to that date; tick off each one that appears on the statement. The Difference figure moves toward zero as you go. When it reads $0.00, press Finish Reconciling.

The difference is what is unaccounted for, and its size is the clue. If it matches one transaction on your statement exactly, that transaction is missing here - add it. If it is double a transaction you can see, that one is entered twice. If it is small and odd, check for a fee or interest line the bank added. Also make sure the statement balance you typed is the closing balance for that exact statement date.

Budgeting itself - accounts, envelopes, importing, reconciling, everything above - is free. Pro is $5 a month and adds AI Merchant Descriptions, and it can be cancelled at any time.

When a bank line is an unreadable merchant code, it looks the merchant up and tells you what they most likely sell, so you can work out what the purchase was. It is on the transaction edit page and is part of Pro. There is a demo in Video Tutorials.

Settings in the top menu. It has Manage Subscription, Update Payment Method and past invoices.

Settings in the top menu, which is also under your name in the top right.

At the bottom of Settings. It asks you to type DELETE to confirm, and it is permanent - your profile, accounts, envelopes and transactions all go, and cannot be recovered.

Your financial data is encrypted at rest, which is why signing back in after a while asks you to re-enter your password - the key that decrypts your data is held only for your session. The Security & Encryption link in the footer explains it in full.

No. The help chat is given documentation about how the app works and nothing else. It cannot see your accounts, envelopes, balances or transactions, and none of that is ever sent to the chat service. That is also why it cannot answer questions about your own numbers.

Your data is encrypted with a key derived from your password and held only while your session is active. When the session expires the key is dropped, so signing in again is what makes your data readable. It is the encryption working, not a bug.

Yes. Every page is built for phones, and it can be installed to your home screen from your browser's menu so it opens like an app.