Guide · chapter 4

Most of these
are the app being
right at you.

Budgeting apps have a habit of showing you something alarming and then explaining nothing. Here are the screens that get reported as bugs, what each one is actually saying, and the handful that really are something to fix.

Looks wrong · is right

Amber, but I have not gone over budget.

There are two ways to overspend and the bar shows both. The obvious one is spending past the target. The other is spending past the money that was actually in the envelope — which is a different problem, and the one people miss.

  • $600 target, $180 actually funded, $300 spent — inside the target, past the money
  • Covered spending stops at whichever is smaller: what you funded, or what you budgeted
  • Everything beyond that is amber, because it was paid for with money the envelope never had
  • The fix is funding, not restraint — allocate more, or move some in from elsewhere

Looks wrong · is right

It says funded, and I have not funded it this month.

Rollover counts. An envelope carrying money in from last month has real money in it, so it is not short just because the new period has not topped it up yet — and reading it as short would make every sinking fund look broken on the first of the month.

  • The carried balance is included in “funded”, because it is genuinely there
  • This is what makes sinking funds work — car service, insurance, Christmas
  • A period’s own allocation is shown separately, so you can still see this month’s effort
  • Only a genuinely negative balance can push an envelope into the overdrawn state

Actually wrong

The same purchase, twice.

Nearly always the same story: you typed it at the till, then created it again from a statement import because the descriptions did not look alike enough to match. Same day, same cent, one reconciled and one not — that pairing is the fingerprint.

  • Delete the one that is not marked reconciled — the other is tied to a statement line
  • It happens when amount and date match but the bank’s description is unrecognisable
  • Linking the two by hand during review prevents it, and teaches nothing for next time
  • A rule for that payee does teach it: the description gets recognised from then on

The symptom index.

Find the sentence that sounds like your complaint.

My account balance does not match my bank.

Three causes, in order of likelihood. Something is unrecorded — the commonest by far, and reconciliation finds it in one pass. An amount is transposed — $48 typed for $84, which no eyeball ever catches but a balance comparison does immediately. The opening balance was wrong — whatever you typed when you created the account, carried forward ever since.

Reconciling tells you the exact size of the gap, which is far more useful than knowing there is one. Chapter three walks the whole flow.

I paid my credit card and my budget looks wrong now.

Almost certainly you recorded the payment as an expense against an envelope. It is not one — you recorded the expense when you bought the thing, and booking it again takes the money out of your budget twice.

Use the card payment screen rather than a normal expense, and the envelopes are correctly left alone. Chapter two explains why in full; it is the single most common misunderstanding in envelope budgeting, and it is not your fault — most apps genuinely do require the opposite.

Ready to Budget is negative.

You have allocated more to envelopes than you have recorded as income. That is not a bug and nothing is broken — it is the pool telling you the budget currently promises money that has not arrived.

Either record the income you have received, or take some back out of the envelopes. Note that spending never changes this number; only income and allocation do.

An envelope went negative and I do not know how.

Something was spent from it that it could not cover — often a recurring transaction that processed on schedule, or a transaction whose envelope was changed after the fact. Open the envelope and read the period’s transactions; the list is the whole story, and every balance change has a line in it.

I deleted a transaction and the balance did not go back.

It should have, immediately — deleting reverses the amount out of the envelope at once. What a deleted transaction does keep is a place in Trash for thirty days, so it can be restored. A row sitting in Trash is not counted in any balance; if a figure genuinely looks unreversed, it is worth checking that you are looking at the same budget period the transaction was in.

My other device is showing different numbers.

Check that sync is on, that both devices are signed in to the same account, and that they are in the same workspace — a personal budget and a shared one are deliberately separate, and switching between them changes every figure on screen.

Sync also needs Premium. On the free tier each device keeps its own budget, permanently and by design, and there is no background process quietly reconciling them.

Changes are stuck as pending.

Pending means recorded locally and not yet pushed. Offline, that is exactly right and it will clear when the connection returns. If it persists while online, the usual cause is a session that needs signing in again.

Nothing is at risk while it says pending: the data is written to your device first and the queue is what catches up, not what stores it.

A recurring transaction did not appear.

Recurring rules are processed when the app opens, not by a server on your behalf — a consequence of the budget living on your device rather than in our database. Open the app and it catches up. If a rule fired into a period you have since closed, its transaction is in that period, not this one.

I hit a limit I did not know about.

The free tier allows 10 envelopes and 50 transactions a month. Both are real limits rather than nags, and the app says which one you have reached. Pricing lists every limit for every tier, including the ones that are not obvious.

None of this matches what I am seeing.

Then it may genuinely be a bug, and we would rather hear about it than have you work around it. Note what you did, what you expected and what appeared instead — and, if a figure is wrong, which envelope and which period. That is usually enough to reproduce it.

The general shape of every answer here

Nearly every confusing screen in this app comes from one of three places, and knowing which one you are in resolves most of them without any further reading.

  1. Funded is not the same as spent, and neither is the same as the target. Most apps collapse all three into one percentage, which is exactly why they cannot tell you the difference between “I have not spent it” and “it was never there”.
  2. The budget and your accounts are separate systems on purpose. Income and allocation move the budget. Charges and payments move the accounts. Confusing one for the other is behind almost every “this number is wrong”.
  3. Nothing changes a balance without leaving a transaction behind. If a figure moved, there is a line explaining it. Opening the envelope and reading its period is a faster diagnosis than any support article, this one included.

Numbers that explain themselves.

And a guide for the times they do not.

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Never Summer Mountains · mark byzewski, CC BY 2.0