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 modal, the four-step setup, installing the app on your phone or computer, and what to expect in the first week.
• Concepts — The handful of words Essential Budget uses, defined once. Item, event, schedule, transaction, category, and account are the only terms you need before reading anything else here.
• 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 real money movements are recorded in Essential Budget. Adding, editing, and deleting transactions inside the Edit Item Event dialog, and how the app keeps the same imported line from being recorded twice.
• Matching Transactions and Resolving Events — How real spending lines up with what you planned. The Match Transactions dialog, AI matching versus the manual fallback, when a tracked line closes itself, 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 drift apart, 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 recurring lines in your budget, like rent, paychecks, the gym, and groceries. Set the schedule once, choose whether each event tracks one transaction or many, and the planner fills in.
• Bank Linking — Connecting your bank to Essential Budget through Plaid so Match can pull transactions from your bank. 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 transactions into Essential Budget from a CSV, TSV, or TXT file exported from your bank. Where to upload, what the parser tolerates, how candidate transactions become real ones, 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Picks — How the free tier's Picks tab works, why Premium subscribers don't see it by default, how to switch it on if you do want it on Premium, and what is and is not tracked when you tap a card.
• Notifications — How the bell-icon badge, the Notifications panel, and the Notifications page work, what events trigger an unread notification, 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 canonical page for the full mechanic.
• 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.