Learn Essential Budget

Pick a topic from the sidebar, or jump straight to one below.

• Getting Started — Your first 30 minutes with Essential Budget. The Welcome dialog, the four-step setup, installing the app on your phone or computer, and what to expect in the first week.
• Concepts — Core vocabulary for Essential Budget: accounts, categories, items, schedules, events, transactions, and how optional Transaction Tracking changes an event.
• Planner — The Planner is the day-to-day home of your budget. Two views, a running balance for every account, and a small toolbar for adding items, matching transactions, marking events paid, resolving them, or editing one event.
• Transactions — How optional Transaction Tracking records individual purchases, charges, and deposits inside the Edit Item Event dialog, and how the app keeps the same imported transaction from being recorded twice.
• Matching Transactions and Resolving Events — How bank and uploaded payments, deposits, and transfers are matched to planned events. The Match Transactions dialog, AI matching versus the manual fallback, how events with Transaction Tracking on resolve, how account balances move, and how to undo a resolve or delete.
• History and Undo — The History tab records every event you resolved or deleted, with a row-by-row Undo that restores the event to your planner and adjusts your account balance when needed. History keeps the current calendar year plus the previous five full years on every plan.
• Reports — The Reports tab visualizes your budget several ways. Project account balances, see cash in versus cash out, break spending down by category, and skim the bills that aren't resolved yet.
• Budgets — How to find, open, create, edit, leave, and delete the budgets you keep in Essential Budget, plus the monthly creation cap and what happens to bank links and collaborators along the way.
• Accounts — How to add and manage accounts in Essential Budget. Set the Current Balance, edit it when the app and your bank stop matching, and understand what is removed when you delete an account.
• Categories — How to add, organize, and delete the categories that drive your budget's math. Income, Expense, and Transfer types; sub-category nesting; and what happens to items when a category is reassigned or deleted.
• Items — Items are the things you plan once and see repeatedly, like rent, paychecks, the gym, and groceries. Set the schedule once, choose whether each event uses optional Transaction Tracking, and the planner fills in.
• Bank Linking — Connecting your bank to Essential Budget through Plaid so you can pull transactions from your bank with Match Transactions. How linking works at the user-account and per-budget level, what gets imported, what to do when a connection breaks, and how to disconnect.
• File Uploads — Bringing bank transactions into Essential Budget from a CSV, TSV, or TXT file. Where to upload, what the parser accepts, how file rows match planned events, and why re-uploading the same file is safe.
• Sharing a Budget — Share a budget with up to 5 people by email. Three permission levels, blocking, and what happens to collaborators when Premium ends or your account is deleted.
• Your Public Profile — Where your published budgets, themes, and icon sets show up for other users to find. How to control what's shown, what each Show toggle does, and what changes when you rename your username.
• Publishing a Budget — How to publish a budget so signed-in users with the link can read it, what each kind of viewer sees, the rules that block publishing, where the published budget shows up, and how to take it back.
• Receipts — Scanning receipts in Essential Budget. How capture and automatic filing work, linking receipts to planned events, adding itemized purchases to your budget, tax deductible tracking, the year-end tax report, and grocery insights.
• Publishing Lists and Recipes — How to publish a shopping list or recipe to a public link, what is shared (the items only, never your prices or stores), the optional rough total, managing and unpublishing, and importing a shared list or recipe into your own budget.
• Shopping Lists — Building shopping lists in Essential Budget. Fast entry with autocomplete from your own purchases, a running basket total, aisle grouping, where each item is cheapest, check-off, and sharing a list with your household.
• Discover — How the Discover page works, what it ranks, how the Today / This Week / This Month / This Year sections are picked, and what it does and does not include.
• Recipes — Saving recipes in Essential Budget. Cost to make priced from your own receipts, search, importing a recipe from a link for free, scanning a photo or PDF, and turning a recipe into a shopping list.
• Themes and Icons — How to pick a theme or icon set for your budget, create your own, generate one with AI, publish to the community, back up your work, and what changes when Premium ends.
• Your Account — How to find your plan and billing, change your username, back up and restore a budget, clear local data on a device, sign out, and delete your account.
• Notifications — How the bell-icon badge, the Notifications panel, and the Notifications page work, what triggers a notification, how to set up push notifications and bill reminders, and how to clear or block them.
• Subscription — What's free in Essential Budget, what comes with Premium at $11.99 a month, how AI features and credits work, and what changes when Premium ends.
• Accessibility — Settings that affect how the app reads. Text size, light or dark mode, date format, and timezone, with notes on where each one lives in Settings.
• Troubleshooting — Common questions and the fastest path to a fix. Each entry names the symptom in search-style language and points to the main page for the full explanation.
• Glossary — Every term used in this guide, in one alphabetical list, with a short definition and a link to the page that covers it more fully.