Budgets

1. Tap the + button and choose Budget. The + is on every screen, so you do not have to be on the Plan page first. With no budgets yet, the Add Monthly Budget button on the empty Budgets tab opens the same form.
2. Enter a Budget Name. This is yours to choose - Groceries, Date Nights, Dog, whatever matches how you think.
3. Choose the Budget Type: Monthly or Annual. The rest of the form appears once you pick one. Get this one right first, because it cannot be changed later. (The third choice, Out of Pocket, is for money you expect to be paid back - see Out of Pocket Budgets. While WorryFree is off there is a fourth, WorryFree, which adds no budget at all: it switches your monthly budgets for one spending limit - see WorryFree.)
4. Set the amount you want to stay under.
5. Pick an icon so you can spot it in a list.
6. Link one or more spending categories. Every transaction in those categories lands in this budget from now on.

Mix them freely. Most people end up with mostly monthly budgets and a handful of annual ones for the categories that refuse to behave. See Annual Budgets.

Not every container on the Budgets tab is one of these two, and the others are not limits at all. An Out of Pocket budget holds spending you fronted for someone else and tracks what you are still owed rather than what you have left to spend; create one from the + button. Goal Funds are the other, and they get their own section below.

Each budget shows a progress bar that fills as transactions arrive. Cross the limit and the bar turns red, so the budget that needs attention is obvious without reading a number.

Tap a budget to open it and see the transactions behind the figure, with the same search and filters as any other list. That is the fastest way to answer “why is this one so high?”.

Turn rollover on and a monthly budget carries its unused amount forward instead of resetting. Budget $400 for groceries, spend $350, and next month opens with $450 to work with.

Only positive amounts carry. A month you overspend draws down the surplus you had built rather than starting the next month in the hole. Full detail in Budget Rollover.

Drag budgets in the list to put the ones you check most at the top. The order is yours and applies everywhere the list appears.

When a budget has run its course, archiving beats deleting. Tap the budget card to open it, switch to the Details tab and choose Archive. It leaves your active list and stops counting toward your totals, but the budget and every transaction attached to it are kept.

Archived budgets collect under an Archived section at the bottom of the Monthly and Annual lists. The section only appears once you have archived something, and it starts closed. Open it and an archived budget is the same card it always was: tap it and Restore is waiting in the Details tab, in the slot Archive occupied. Edit is the one thing an archived budget does not offer, so restore it first if you want to change it.

Archiving also unlinks the budget’s categories, so check those if you bring it back. Deleting, by contrast, is permanent.

A Goal Fund also lives on this tab, and it is the one thing here you do not create yourself: it appears when you move a finished savings goal’s money into one. It holds what you saved, never resets at the end of a year, and its spending stays out of your monthly totals.

Funds collect under their own Goal Funds heading, and the heading only appears once you have one. From a fund you can also Add Remainder to a Budget - top up a budget or your WorryFree limit for the current period, and take back whatever you do not spend from that budget’s own Details tab. See Goal Funds.

Overview and Budgets are easy to mix up. Overview reports on the period; Budgets is where the budgets live. The recurring calendar and your transaction history are on the Activity page. See Plan Overview.

One discretionary limit instead of a dozen budgets is a supported way to work, not a lesser one. The WorryFree Budgeting switch is at the bottom of the Budgets tab. See WorryFree.