Guide

Watch it work
before you commit
a single dollar.

Four chapters, in the order you will meet them, drawn live on this page and animated through the actual sequence of taps — not screenshots, and not a video you have to scrub.

Two kinds of picture appear below, and they are marked apart. A screen is a real one, redrawn: same fields, same labels, same rules — though the app's own colours and density differ from this page's. An explanation carries a dashed edge and shows what moved — an envelope falling as a card balance rises, say. No single screen in the app shows that, which is exactly why it is worth drawing.

Chapter 1 · part one

The first ten minutes.

Setting up is four questions and one decision. The decision — how much goes in each envelope — is the only one that takes any thought, and you are allowed to get it wrong the first time.

Plays on its own — or pause it and walk through with the arrows at your own pace. The whole sequence is on the page either way.

1. Say what a month looks like The wizard opens on currency and budget period. Monthly is the default; weekly and biweekly are Premium, and exist because plenty of people are paid that way.

2. Choose the envelopes A starter set you edit, not a blank page. Free keeps up to 10 envelopes, which is genuinely enough to run the method.

3. Put in what you actually have Income lands in one pool — Ready to Budget. Not next month’s salary: today’s balance. If the pool cannot fill the envelopes, that is the information you came for.

4. Hand it out until the pool is zero This is the whole method. Allocation moves money from the pool into envelopes — it is not spending, and it is the only thing that changes what is “left to budget”.

5. That is the budget From here the dashboard is the answer to one question, asked at the till: is there money in this envelope? Nothing else needs maintaining.

Step 1 of 5

Chapter 1 · part two

Then a day of ordinary spending.

This is the loop you actually live in: log it, look at what is left, and every so often admit that one envelope needs money from another. Nothing here takes longer than the card machine does.

1. Log it at the till A bottom sheet, opened from anywhere. Expense or refund first — that reframes every field under it — then the amount, autofocused, so the keyboard is already up as the sheet settles.

2. The envelope drops immediately Striped is what you have spent, solid green is what is left. The number is a balance, not a forecast or a monthly average.

Past the target the bar turns amber, and its width is the size of the overspend — $46.90 of the $246.90 spent.

The card, the pill and the bar above are the app’s own, rendered from its components. The line is ours.

3. Then the month catches up with you It does not block the purchase — it refuses to hide it.

4. Move money, on purpose Groceries came in under. Moving $47 across is the system working, not cheating — the total you can spend has not changed, only which envelope holds it.

Dining out is funded again — the balance is no longer negative — but it stays over budget, because $246.90 is still more than the $200 it was given for the month. The transfer paid for the overspend; it did not unspend it.

Groceries now reads $593.10 of $640.00 funded rather than fully funded, which is the same $46.90 seen from the other side.

5. Covered, not erased The money is there again, and the transfer is in the ledger — so next month you can see that Dining out has been borrowing from Groceries all year.

Step 1 of 5

Week one

What to do before you trust it.

A budget you have not tested is a guess with formatting. Five days of real use tells you more than an hour of planning, and costs less.

  1. Log everything for five days. Including the coffee. Especially the coffee — small, frequent spending is where every guessed target turns out wrong.
  2. Do not fix the targets yet. Let the envelopes go red. A red envelope in week one is data; a target you adjusted on day two to stop it going red is not.
  3. Move money when you need to, and notice when you do. Three transfers out of Groceries in one week is not a discipline failure. It means the Groceries target is wrong, and now you know by how much.
  4. At the end of the month, set the targets to what actually happened. Only then start tightening them, one envelope at a time.
If you only remember one thing

An empty envelope is a decision point, not an error message. Either stop spending in that category, or move money into it deliberately. Both are the system working. Spending anyway and intending to sort it out later is the only way to break it.

Keep going

The rest of the guide.

Chapter one is enough to run a budget indefinitely. The other three are for when you want the numbers to be provable rather than merely close.

Accounts & credit cards

Adding the real accounts behind the budget, and the one thing every envelope app gets asked about: what happens when you pay with a card.

Read it

Reconciliation

Import the statement, let it match, judge what it could not, and finish with a balance you can prove rather than hope for.

Read it

When the numbers disagree

The screens that look wrong and are not, the ones that are, and how to tell which is which in under a minute.

Read it

Questions people ask on day one.

Do I have to enter every transaction by hand?

Yes, or import them from a statement later. There is no bank connection, because a bank connection means somebody holds a credential to your account — see Privacy & security for the full trade. In practice logging takes a few seconds at the till, and it is the moment the decision actually gets made, which is the entire point of the method.

What if I start mid-month?

Start anyway. Fund the envelopes from the money you have right now, not from a full month’s salary, and expect the first period to look lopsided. The second one is the real one.

How much of this needs a subscription?

Chapter one is entirely free — 10 envelopes and 50 transactions a month, which runs the whole method. Accounts need Premium; reconciliation needs Ultimate. Both chapters say so at the top rather than at the end.

Does it work offline?

Completely. The budget is a database on your device and the app reads and writes it directly, so a tunnel, a plane or a dead signal changes nothing. Sync, if you turn it on, catches up afterwards.

What happens to my data if I stop paying?

It stays on your device and stays readable. You drop to the free limits for creating new things, and CSV export works on every tier — including free — so there is no version of this where your own records are held hostage.

Step one is the first thing you see.

The screens above are redrawn, not photographed — but the fields, the labels and the rules are the ones you will meet. Start free and check.

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Never Summer Mountains · mark byzewski, CC BY 2.0