Budgets

A budget in Essential Budget is your workspace: it holds your accounts, your categories, your planner, and your history in one place. You can keep more than one. People often have a personal budget plus a household budget, or a “real life” budget plus a sandbox budget for trying something new.

This page covers the Budgets list page itself: where to find it, how to open a budget, how to create a new one, what the Edit dialog actually changes, and how leaving and deleting work. For your first time setting up a budget step by step, see Getting Started.

Where to find your budgets

Open the hamburger menu in the top corner of any page and tap Budgets. The Budgets page shows every budget you own and every budget that has been shared with you, in a single list.

The toolbar at the top of the page is your launch pad:

• Open Budget opens the selected budget. See Opening a budget.
• Create Budget opens the Create Budget dialog. See Creating a budget.
• Edit Budget opens the Edit Budget dialog for the selected budget. See Editing a budget.
• Delete Budget removes the selected budget; on a budget that someone else owns, the same button reads Leave Budget. See Deleting a budget and Leaving a shared budget.
• Create Backup and Restore save and load a JSON copy of a budget. The flow itself lives on Your Account.
• Grid Settings changes the columns and column order on the Budgets list itself. It does not change anything inside any budget.

The Search box in the page header filters the list as you type, matching budget names. It is the fastest way to find a single budget when you have many.

Opening a budget

A single tap on a row previews the budget: it gets selected, and the toolbar buttons that need a selection (Edit, Delete, Open, Create Backup) light up. A double-tap, or tapping Open Budget in the toolbar, navigates into the budget.

Why this default? Open Budget routes by setup completion. If a budget has at least one account, one category, and one item, Open Budget lands on the Planner tab. If anything is missing, Open Budget lands on the first empty Setup segment instead (Accounts, then Categories, then Items, in that order). The reason is so a brand-new or partly-set-up budget brings you to the page where you can finish setting it up, rather than to a Planner with nothing on it.

Once you are inside a budget, the bottom of the screen shows four tabs: Setup, Planner, Reports, and History. On the free plan, a fifth tab, Picks, appears alongside them.

• Setup is where you add and manage your accounts, categories, and items, organized into three segments at the top of the tab.
• Planner is the day-to-day list of upcoming events.
• Reports is the visualizations side: account-balance projection, sunburst, cash flow, unresolved expenses.
• History is everything that has been resolved, with Undo on each row.
• Picks (free tier) is the affiliate-supported recommendation tab.

The Home dashboard’s Budgets card has a gear icon that lets you choose what tapping a budget card on the Home dashboard opens by default (Planner Grid, Planner Calendar, or one of the charts). That preference does not affect how the Budgets list itself opens budgets.

Creating a budget

Tap Create Budget in the toolbar. The Create Budget dialog opens with two modes at the top.

Manual. Type a Name (required, up to 50 characters) and pick an optional Theme and Icon Set. Save. The new budget appears in the list, and the Review Budget Setup prompt opens it on the Setup tab so you can add accounts, categories, and items.

AI Generated. This mode is on Premium by default. The app reads either a CSV from your bank, or, if you have linked a bank account, the recurring transactions Plaid has identified, and builds a starter budget for you with categories and recurring items already in place. A toggle in the dialog lets you switch between Integrated AI (Premium) and Bring Your Own AI (Free). With Bring Your Own AI, the app generates a prompt you copy into your own AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, anything that returns JSON), and you paste the response back into the dialog. Free, but with a copy-and-paste step. See Subscription for what each path sends, what stays local, and how the included Premium Subscriber Credits cover Integrated AI.

The dialog blocks duplicate names and shows “A budget named ’…’ already exists” while you type. You can change a budget’s name later from Edit Budget; the duplicate-name check applies to creates and renames the same way.

If a Premium subscriber has Plaid linked, AI mode shows a Connect Bank segment in addition to Upload File. Picking Connect Bank lists your linked accounts and lets you build the budget straight from the bank’s recurring stream data, with no file to upload. The new budget can be linked to those bank accounts when it saves so Match Transactions has live transactions to work with right away. See Bank Linking for the connection itself.

The first time you save in AI mode, a loading screen with the text “Usually takes 1-2 minutes” stays open while the AI processes. When it finishes, the Budget Created Successfully! modal lists the categories, items, and accounts the AI created, and the Review Budget Setup button takes you straight to the Setup tab to adjust amounts and balances.

How many budgets you can create

Free accounts can use up to 3 budget creation slots per calendar month. Premium raises that to 10 per calendar month. The cap is on new creates for the current month, not on the total number of budgets you keep.

Why this default? Deleting a budget frees a slot in the same calendar month. If you create three budgets in May, hit the cap, then delete one of those three, the cap reads as “2 of 3 used” and you can create another one in May. The math is “creates minus deletes for the calendar month, never below zero.” Budgets you have already kept across earlier months do not count, and deleting old budgets you made last year does not give you extra slots; the limit is about how much new work you can spin up this month, not how much you have lying around.

When you have hit the cap, tapping Create Budget shows a toast: “Monthly budget creation limit reached (X/Y). Limit resets next month.” On the free plan, the same toast adds “Upgrade to premium for up to 10 per month.” The cap resets at the first of the next calendar month. See Subscription for how this fits with the rest of the free tier.

Editing a budget

Tap Edit Budget in the toolbar with a budget selected. The dialog title reflects the budget’s sharing state: Edit Private Budget with a lock icon, Edit Shared Budget with a people icon, or Edit Public Budget with a globe icon.

The dialog covers four things:

• Name. Rename the budget. The 50-character maximum and the duplicate-name check from Create Budget apply.
• Theme. Tap the row to open the Select Theme picker. The picker scopes to your library and the community library; tap a theme to apply it to this budget. See Themes and Icons for the picker, the per-budget theme rule, and what changing it does.
• Icon Set. Tap the row to open the Select Icon Set picker, which works the same way for icon sets.
• Sharing. Owners on Premium see the sharing list and the Share button, which opens the invite flow. Free owners see a “To enable budget sharing, upgrade to premium” line in this slot. See Sharing a Budget.

Only the budget’s owner can edit anything in this dialog. Editors and viewers see the same dialog with the title prefix changed to View (so View Shared Budget, View Private Budget, or View Public Budget) and every field is read-only. To rename a shared budget you do not own, ask an owner to make the change.

The Delete Budget button at the bottom of the dialog is the same delete flow the toolbar’s Delete Budget button runs, with the same confirmations.

Backing up and restoring

The toolbar’s Create Backup and Restore buttons live on this page because they act on the selected budget (Backup) or replace nothing and create a new one (Restore). The dialogs themselves, the file format, and the scheduling-rebase rule are documented on Your Account. Take a backup of a budget you are about to delete if you might want it later; the LastOwnerWarning dialog repeats that tip in passing.

Leaving a shared budget

If you are an editor or viewer on a budget that someone else owns, the Delete Budget toolbar button reads Leave Budget instead. Tap it. The Leave Shared Budget dialog asks you to confirm: “You will lose access to this shared budget. To regain access, the owner will need to invite you again. The budget and its data will remain intact for other collaborators.”

When you confirm, your access is removed, the budget disappears from your list, and every owner of that budget receives a User Left Budget notification with your username and the budget’s name. Editors and viewers cannot send invites; to come back later, the owner has to re-invite you.

Owners cannot use the Leave Budget button. As an owner, the way to step away from a budget is to remove yourself from the sharing list inside Edit Budget. See Sharing a Budget for ownership transfer and self-removal.

Removing a public budget you added

Public budgets are different. If you added a public budget by share link or by tapping it on a creator’s public profile, the toolbar reads Leave Budget with a confirmation that says “This will remove the public budget from your list. You can add it again later using the public link. The budget and its data will remain accessible to others.” Confirming removes only your subscription to it; the budget itself stays public. See Publishing a Budget.

Deleting a budget

Owners get a Delete Budget button on the toolbar (and inside the Edit Budget dialog). The flow has two possible confirmations:

• You are the only owner. The Delete Budget dialog opens with the warning: “You are the last owner of ’…’. Deleting this budget will permanently remove all associated data including: All accounts and balances, All categories, All budget items and schedules, All transaction history, All shared access records. This action cannot be undone.” A Tip below the list reminds you that you can use the Backup icon in the toolbar first.
• Several owners share the budget. The Cannot Delete Budget dialog opens instead: “This budget has N owners. You can only remove your own access. To delete this budget: 1. Other owners must remove themselves first. 2. When you are the last owner, you can then delete the budget.”

Deleting a budget removes the budget and every account, category, item, transaction, and history entry inside it, plus the sharing list. Editors and viewers on a deleted budget lose access automatically; they do not receive a notification, the budget simply disappears from their list. There is no recall window; the moment you confirm, the data is gone.

Why this default? Deleting a budget does not disconnect your bank. Bank linkages live at your account level, not at the budget level. If the budget you delete had transactions imported from Plaid, the link itself stays connected after the delete, and you can build a new budget on top of the same accounts without re-authorising at your bank. To actually disconnect a bank, manage it from the Bank Linking page (see Bank Linking). To remove the bank linkage entirely along with the rest of your data, the right tool is Deleting your account, not deleting one budget.

If you change your mind before tapping Delete Budget in the dialog, Cancel closes the confirmation and nothing happens. After confirming, you cannot undo the deletion; restore a backup if you have one.

Behind the scenes

A few details that the screen does not surface directly:

• The list works offline; mutations need a connection. Reads of your existing budgets come from the local cache, so the page renders even with no internet. Create Budget, Edit Budget, Delete Budget, and Leave Budget show an offline message instead of running until the connection is back.
• The slot counter is per calendar month, not per rolling 30 days. A budget you created on April 30 stops counting against your slot total at midnight at the start of May. Deletes are subtracted within their own calendar month: deleting in May an budget created in April does not give you another May slot.
• Plaid connections persist when a budget is deleted. The Plaid Item (the live token to your bank) is keyed to your user account, not to a budget. Deleting a Plaid-linked budget removes the bank-linked accounts inside it but leaves the connection itself in place for the next budget. To disconnect at Plaid, use the Bank Linking page.
• Themes and icon sets are per budget, not per user. Changing the Theme or Icon Set on a shared budget changes it for every collaborator on that budget. The themes and icon sets in your library are still yours; only the assignment on this budget is shared. See Themes and Icons.

Related pages

• Getting Started: the worked first-run walkthrough through accounts, categories, items, and the planner.
• Subscription: the 3 vs 10 per-month creation cap, what each tier includes, and the AI overview.
• Your Account: full-budget Backup and Restore, your username, cancellation, account deletion.
• Themes and Icons: the Theme + Icon Set rows in Edit Budget, the picker, AI Theme Generation.
• Sharing a Budget: inviting collaborators, the role rules, ownership transfer, blocking.
• Publishing a Budget: making a budget public, public-budget removal, the rules around bank-linked data.
• Bank Linking: connecting Plaid accounts and using Connect Bank in AI Budget Creation.
• Notifications: the “User Left Budget” notification owners receive when an editor or viewer leaves.