Learn - Accounts
The places your money sits, and the number you keep in step with your bank.
Accounts
This page covers the Accounts segment of the Setup tab: how to add an account, what the Current Balance field really represents, what to do when the app’s number drifts away from your bank’s, and what is removed when you delete an account.
An account in Essential Budget stands in for one place your money sits, like a checking account or a savings account. Every transaction in your budget is recorded against an account, and every account has a balance the app keeps current as transactions land.
Where Accounts lives
Open a budget and tap the Setup tab at the bottom of the screen. The tab opens with Accounts selected in the segment at the top. Categories and Items are the other two segments of the same tab.
The Accounts segment shows every account in this budget, with a toolbar at the top of the screen for adding, editing, deleting, and arranging accounts. Drag a row to reorder it. The search box on the page header filters the list by name.
Adding an account
Tap Add Account on the toolbar. The New Account dialog opens with three required fields:
- Account Name. A name you’ll recognize at a glance. “Chase Checking” beats “Account 1.” Up to 50 characters, and unique within the budget.
- Current Balance. What your bank shows the account at, right now. Open your bank app and copy the number across.
- Account Type. Either Checking or Savings. Those are the only two options.
Description (up to 1,000 characters) and Account Icon are optional. Save when you’re done, and the new account appears in the list.
For example, you might add a Chase Checking account with a Current Balance of $2,847.13 and the Checking type, then add a second account named Ally Savings with a Current Balance of $5,200.00 and the Savings type.
You don’t need to add every account on day one. Two or three is enough to start using the planner. You can add more later, up to 250 per budget.
Why is the Current Balance still editable after you save? Your bank is the source of truth for your real balance. If the app’s number ever drifts away from your bank’s, you fix it directly. The app does not silently change the balance on its own, because that could hide a transaction the app missed.
How the balance changes
Three things move an account’s balance in the app.
A transaction is recorded. Every transaction (typed in by hand, pulled from a linked bank, or uploaded from a file) updates the balance the moment it lands. The direction comes from the linked item’s category, not from the transaction amount: an Income category raises the balance, an Expense category lowers it, and a Transfer category moves money between two of your accounts (one balance goes down, the other goes up by the same amount).
An event is resolved without a transaction attached. Some events (a cash payment, a manual close at the end of a period) are resolved without an attached transaction. In that case, the planned amount on the event is what moves the balance at the moment of resolve. The full picture of resolving lives on the Matching and Resolving page.
You edit the Current Balance directly. Open the account from the Accounts segment, change the Current Balance, save. The app records the new balance and the running total continues from there.
That is the complete list. Nothing else moves an account’s balance in the app.
When the app and your bank disagree
The app’s running balance and your bank’s balance occasionally fall out of step. Common causes:
- A transaction the bank charged that hasn’t reached the app yet (a small fee, a card-not-present hold).
- A transaction in the app that the bank later reversed.
- The Current Balance you typed when you added the account was off by a few cents from the start.
- Pending versus settled transactions are reported differently on the bank’s side and the app’s.
You have two ways to bring them back in line.
Re-anchor by editing the Current Balance. Open the account, change the Current Balance to whatever your bank shows right now, save. Fast, and the running balance is correct from this point on. It does not explain the drift, but for most people that is fine.
Find the cause and fix the underlying record. Open the planner and walk back through recent events to find a transaction that should have been recorded but wasn’t, or one that was recorded twice. Add the missing transaction inside the Edit Item Event dialog (tap the event row to open it), or remove the duplicate from there. Slower, but it preserves an accurate audit trail.
For day-to-day drift, the first option is what most people use. The app is meant to track your money, not be a forensic record. If you find yourself re-anchoring frequently, a closer look at the day-to-day flow on Matching and Resolving usually closes the gap.
Why does the app let you change the Current Balance at all? Because pretending the app’s number is the law would just mean people stop trusting the app the first time it drifts. Letting you set it directly keeps the in-app balance honest, even when the underlying movement is something the app cannot see (a fee charged at 3 a.m. that won’t sync until tomorrow).
Linking an account to your bank
Connecting a bank account to a budget account so Match can pull bank transactions is part of the Premium Bank Account Linking feature. The connection is set up when the budget is created: the Create Budget dialog has an AI Generated mode with a Connect Bank segment, where you pick which of your linked bank accounts the new budget should pull from. The accounts you pick become linked accounts in the new budget.
For an account inside an already-created budget, you can unlink it from the bank, but you cannot freshly link a different bank account to it. To start a budget with bank linking, create a new budget through the Connect Bank path.
When an account is linked, opening it shows a Bank Connection section with an Unlink button. Unlinking removes the connection between this budget account and the bank account it was pulling from. Existing transactions on the account stay where they are; future bank pulls for that budget account simply stop. Only the budget owner can unlink (collaborators with edit access cannot).
The full setup, including how transactions are pulled and what happens when you unlink, is on Bank linking.
Why is bank linking only set up at budget creation? Rewiring a long-running budget to a new bank account part-way through introduces awkward edges (which historical transactions move with the account, what happens to balances on the day of the switch). The flow keeps a clean line: a budget either started with bank linking or it didn’t.
Account types
Two account types exist: Checking and Savings. The type is mostly a label and an icon hint; it does not control the math, since the direction of every balance change comes from the item’s category, not the account.
If your bank account doesn’t fit either label exactly, pick the closest one. The type is also locked for accounts linked to your bank: the linked account’s type comes from the bank itself, and the field shows the helper text Account type is set by your bank.
Deleting an account
Open the account from the Accounts segment of the Setup tab and tap Delete Account. The Delete Account dialog opens, listing what will be removed:
- The number of items currently using this account, along with their schedules.
- The scheduled events on those items (the rows you see on the Planner).
- The active transactions still planned against those items.
Resolved entries already in History are preserved. Their link back to the deleted item is dropped, but the History row itself, with the item name, account name, category, and amount, stays where it is. The Undo button on a History row tied to a deleted account no longer works (Undo refuses to recreate state that has been deleted, and “the original account no longer exists” is one of the eight reasons listed on History and Undo), but the record of what happened is intact.
The dialog’s final line, This action cannot be undone, applies to everything currently on the planner: items, schedules, scheduled events, and the transactions still planned against them. Once you confirm, those go away, and there is no Undo for an account deletion itself.
If you want to keep the items but stop using this account, change each item’s account first. Open the item from the Items segment of the Setup tab, pick a different account, save. Once nothing on this account is in use, deleting it removes only the account itself.
Transfer items and account deletion
A Transfer item references two accounts: a From Account and a To Account. If the account you are deleting sits on either side of a Transfer item, that whole Transfer item is deleted along with the account, even though the other side is a different account that you are keeping.
For example, a Move to Savings item that transfers from Chase Checking to Ally Savings is removed when you delete Ally Savings, even though Chase Checking stays put. The Transfer line is gone from the planner, and Chase Checking is unaffected by the deletion itself; you would need to recreate the Transfer item against a new destination account if you want the recurring move to continue.
Why is account deletion irreversible? Once an account’s items, schedules, and planned transactions have been removed, there is no clean way to recreate the original state, since the running balance on every account in the budget depended on those transactions. The dialog calls this out before you confirm, so you have a chance to step back.
Who can do what
Your role on the budget controls what you can do here. The roles come from Sharing:
- Viewers see the dialog open as View Account: every field is read-only, no Save, no Delete.
- Editors can add, edit, and delete accounts, and re-anchor the Current Balance.
- The owner can do everything an editor can, plus unlink an account from the bank.
The Setup tab toolbar disables Add, Edit, and Delete for viewers, so the buttons are visible but greyed out.
AI is not involved here
Adding, editing, and deleting accounts are entirely manual. AI does not propose names, set balances, change types, or remove accounts. The only AI involvement near accounts is during AI Generated budget creation, where the budget-generation flow proposes a starter set of accounts you review and approve before the budget is created. After the budget exists, the Accounts segment is yours.
Quick reference
| If you want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Add an account | Setup tab, Accounts segment, Add Account, fill in the New Account dialog |
| Reorder accounts | Drag a row in the list to its new position |
| Search the list | Type in the search box at the top of the Setup tab |
| Re-anchor when the app and bank drift apart | Open the account, change Current Balance to match the bank, save |
| Track an account that isn’t checking or savings | Pick whichever type is closer (the math is the same) |
| Connect a budget to your bank | Create a new budget, pick AI Generated, choose the Connect Bank segment |
| Unlink a linked account | Open the account, tap Unlink in the Bank Connection section (owner only) |
| Delete an account | Open the account, tap Delete Account, confirm in the Delete Account dialog |
| Keep items when removing an account | Move each item to a different account first, then delete the (now-empty) account |
| Add more than 250 accounts | Not possible; the cap is 250 per budget |
Behind the scenes
Skim past this section on a first read; it explains a few mechanics you can sometimes feel without needing to know them.
The running balance is stored, not recomputed on the fly. When a transaction is added or removed, the app applies the signed change to the account row directly. That keeps account balances fast to read, but it means every code path that touches a transaction has to walk the balance with it. Re-anchoring by editing Current Balance writes the new number directly; the running total picks up from there.
Two collaborators editing the same account at the same time get a “modified by another user” error. The app checks the version of the account row when you save, and the second save in a tight window is rejected so neither person silently overwrites the other. Refresh the screen to see the saved changes, then make yours on top.
Account icon colours come from your theme. The icon you pick is just a glyph; the colour is computed at render time from the theme palette using the account’s position in the list. Reordering changes which colour each account uses; switching themes restyles every account at once.
Related pages
- Bank linking: the Premium Bank Account Linking feature, including how the connection is set up, what data is pulled, and what happens when you unlink.
- Matching and Resolving: the day-to-day flow that keeps your balance current as transactions land.
- Transactions: how individual transactions are added, edited, and removed, and how each one moves an account’s balance.
- Items: items reference accounts, including transfer items that touch two accounts at once.
- Categories: the Type on a category (Income, Expense, Transfer) is what decides which way the balance moves.
- History and Undo: what survives when you delete an account, and the eight reasons Undo can refuse.
- Sharing: the role on a shared budget that controls what you can do on this page.