Learn Essential Budget

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

• Getting Started — Your first half hour with Essential Budget. The Welcome dialog, creating a budget, adding accounts, categories, and the bills and paychecks that repeat, and reading the planner.
• Concepts — Core vocabulary for Essential Budget: accounts, categories, flows, schedules, events, transactions, and how a flow due over a date range differs from a dated bill.
• Receipts — Scanning receipts in Essential Budget. Capture and automatic filing, linking receipts to planned events, itemized line items, and adding purchases to your budget.
• Scanning Barcodes — Scanning a product onto a receipt line in Essential Budget. Photograph the front of the package, check the name and size the app read off it, then scan the barcode to save it. The barcode is read on your own device, a package photo uses AI credits, and product photos are never shared.
• Planner — The Planner is the day-to-day home of your budget. Two views, a running balance for every account, and a toolbar for adding flows, matching transactions, marking events paid, resolving them, or editing one event.
• Receipt-Based Budgeting — Start by scanning receipts and let Essential Budget build your budget from them. One Sync button reads your receipts, proposes budget lines with the rhythm and amount your own spending shows, and fills in the months you already paid for. Building is part of Premium; every account includes 10 free scans, and all receipt reports are free.
• Transactions — How individual purchases, charges, and deposits are recorded inside an event, how they move your account balance, 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, what decides a match, how events resolve and move your balance, and how to undo a resolve or a delete.
• Receipt Reports — The six receipt reports in Essential Budget. A monthly overview, spending by department or store, per-unit price history, store savings comparisons, area prices, and shareable recaps.
• History and Undo — History keeps a permanent record of every event you have resolved or deleted, with a one-row-at-a-time Undo that puts the event back on your planner. History keeps the current calendar year plus the previous five full years on every plan.
• Reports — The Reports tab turns your budget into charts. Project account balances forward, see cash in versus cash out, break spending down by category, skim the bills you have not resolved, and open your receipt reports.
• Taxes and Deductibles — Tracking tax deductible purchases in Essential Budget. Mark deductible lines on scanned receipts, link refunds and credits, and export a year-end report as PDF, CSV, or ZIP.
• Budgets — How to find, open, create, edit, leave, and delete the budgets you keep in Essential Budget, plus the monthly creation limit 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, correct it when the app and your bank stop matching, and see exactly what deleting an account removes.
• Shopping Lists — Building shopping lists in Essential Budget. Fast entry with autocomplete from your own purchases, a running basket total, aisle grouping, a trip plan that says whether one stop or two is cheaper, check-off, and sharing a list with your household.
• 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 flows when a category is reassigned or deleted.
• Flows — A flow is an income, an expense, or a transfer with one or more schedules that create the events on your Planner. Rent, paychecks, the gym, and groceries are each one flow.
• Recipes — Saving recipes in Essential Budget. Cost to make priced from your own receipts, search across titles and ingredients, importing a recipe from a link for free, adding photos, scanning a photo or PDF, and turning a recipe into a shopping list.
• Bank Linking — Connecting your bank to Essential Budget through Plaid so you can pull transactions with Match Transactions. How linking works at the account and budget level, what gets imported and when, 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 — Invite people to a budget by email with View Only, Can Edit, or Owner access. Covers the share list, the invitation limits, leaving a budget, blocking, and what happens when Premium ends.
• Your Public Profile — The page behind your username, where your published budgets, themes, and icon sets are listed. How the four Show toggles control it, 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 viewers see, the rules that block publishing, where the published budget shows up, and how to take it back.
• 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.
• Discover — How the Discover page works, what its Top Icons, Top Icon Sets, and Top Themes groups rank, what the four time periods change, and what is deliberately not on Discover.
• Community Prices — Comparing your grocery prices with shoppers near you in Essential Budget. Contribution is off by default, only anonymized prices are shared, and area prices need 20 or more shoppers.
• Themes and Icons — How to pick a theme or icon set for a budget, build one by hand, generate one with AI, back it up, publish it to the community, 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 badge, the Notifications dialog, and the Notifications page work, what triggers a notification, how to set up push notifications and bill reminders, and how to clear them.
• Subscription — What's free in Essential Budget, what comes with Premium at $11.99 a month, how AI credits and Icon Generation 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.