Concepts

Essential Budget is for planning your future finances. You set up accounts, categories, flows, and schedules; the app turns that setup into planned events on the Planner. When a bill is paid, a paycheck arrives, or a grocery week ends, you resolve the event. Any event can hold individual transactions along the way, and a flow can be due on a single date or over a date range.

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How the words fit together

You create a flow for something you expect: rent, a paycheck, groceries, a transfer to savings. Every flow is an income, an expense, or a transfer; its category decides which. The flow uses an account and has one or more schedules. Each schedule puts one or more dated events on the Planner.

The schedule creates an event for each date or date range it places on the Planner. A monthly Rent flow creates a May rent event, a June rent event, and so on. A weekly Groceries flow creates one grocery event for each week. Every event can hold individual transactions: purchases, charges, or deposits recorded against it, each moving the account balance as soon as it is saved.

What differs is when the event is due, controlled by Due Over a Date Range, an optional setting on the flow. With it off, the event is a dated bill, paycheck, or transfer: one matched payment, deposit, or transfer from a linked bank or uploaded file resolves it, or you tap Resolve Event and let its amount move the balance. With it on, the event covers the stretch from one occurrence to the day before the next, the way groceries spread across a week, and matching lets it collect transactions until they reach the planned amount.

A second optional setting, Show Spending Progress, adds a progress bar to the flow’s planner rows showing how much of the planned amount has been recorded.

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Account

An account is one place your money sits. The app has two account types: Checking and Savings. The type is mostly a label and icon hint. It does not decide whether money is added or subtracted.

The important number on an account is Current Balance. You enter it when you add the account. After that, the app changes it when transactions are saved inside events, when matched payments, deposits, or transfers from a linked bank or uploaded file are confirmed, or when you resolve an event without any transaction detail. If the app’s balance stops matching your bank’s balance, edit Current Balance to match the bank. Your bank’s number is the number to trust.

An account can be manual, or it can be linked to a bank through Plaid, the third-party service that connects the app to your bank. For linked accounts, the app can fetch bank transactions when you tap Match Transactions on the Planner. Manual accounts rely on events you resolve yourself and optional transactions you enter or upload. A budget can use both kinds of accounts.

See Accounts for account setup and Bank Linking for Plaid.

Category

A category is the bucket a flow lives in. Each category has a Type:

• Income adds money to the account.
• Expense subtracts money from the account.
• Transfer moves money between two of your accounts.

The category type is what gives money its direction in the app. You enter amounts as positive numbers; the category decides the sign. A paycheck under an Income category raises the balance. The same amount under an Expense category lowers it. A Transfer flow uses a From Account and a To Account, so one balance goes down and the other goes up.

Categories can nest under other categories. Housing might contain Rent and Maintenance. Nesting changes organization only; it does not change the math. The app groups your categories under Income, Transfers, and Expenses in the Setup tab, but every category itself is one you created.

See Categories for category types, nesting, and the balance rule.

Flow

A flow is an income, an expense, or a transfer you expect to happen; the type comes from its category. Every flow has one or more schedules, and each schedule creates one or more events on the Planner. The flow stores the name, amount, category, account, schedule, and optional settings such as Auto Pay, Show Spending Progress, and Due Over a Date Range.

Flows can be one-time or recurring. A one-time flow produces one event, such as a tax refund or planned purchase. A recurring flow produces a new event each time the schedule says it should happen, such as rent on the 1st, a paycheck every other Friday, or groceries every week.

Most flows use one account. Transfer flows use two accounts: a From Account and a To Account. Transfer flows are always dated moves between accounts, with neither of the two optional settings.

See Flows for the full flow form and schedule options.

Schedule

A schedule is the rule that creates a flow’s events. The schedule can be One-Time or Recurring.

Recurring schedules can repeat Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annually, Annually, or on a custom Every … interval. A recurring schedule can also start at a specific Payment #, which is useful for a loan or any series where you want the events numbered.

For a flow due over a date range, the schedule also defines each event’s window. A weekly grocery event, for example, represents the whole week of grocery spending rather than one single due-date payment.

See Flows for schedule setup.

Event

An event is one occurrence of a flow. Rent due May 1 is one event. Rent due June 1 is another event from the same flow.

Events appear on the Planner. Grid view shows them as rows. Calendar view shows them on their scheduled dates. On flows due over a date range, the date appears as a range because the event covers that whole period.

An event can be Scheduled, Paid, or Resolved.

• Scheduled means it is still on the Planner.
• Paid is a flag for your reference. The toolbar shows Mark Event as Paid for a Scheduled event and Mark Event as Unpaid for a Paid event. Neither action moves the event to History or changes a balance.
• Resolved means the event has been filed to History. A resolved event leaves the Planner.

Each event also has a Payment #. The number counts forward from the schedule’s starting number, so recurring events appear as #1, #2, #3, and so on.

See Matching and Resolving for the event states.

Due Over a Date Range

Due Over a Date Range is an optional flow setting for spending that spreads across a period instead of falling due on a day. You do not need it to use Essential Budget; many budgets work fine with every event resolving as a whole.

Leave it off for flows that happen all at once: rent, a subscription, a fixed paycheck, a transfer. When you match a payment, deposit, or transfer from a linked bank or uploaded file to such an event, the app uses that amount to update the balance, resolve the event, and move it to History. If there is no bank or uploaded file to match, Resolve Event applies the planned amount and moves the event to History.

Turn it on for flows where actual activity builds up over a period: groceries, gas, dining out, variable income, tips, commissions. The event’s date shows as a range, and matching lets it collect several bank or uploaded transactions before it resolves. Each saved transaction updates the account balance immediately.

During Match Transactions, an event on a flow due over a date range resolves when its recorded transaction total reaches or exceeds the planned amount. If the total is still below the planned amount, the new transactions are saved and the event stays on the Planner with the remaining amount still projected. You can resolve it yourself when you are done with that period. If you try to resolve such an event with no transactions, the No Transactions Recorded dialog lets you add one first or choose Resolve Anyway.

See Flows for when to turn the setting on.

Transaction

A transaction is one purchase, charge, or deposit saved inside an event. A grocery event might hold five supermarket transactions. A gas event might hold two fuel purchases. A tips event might hold several deposits.

Transactions enter the app three ways:

• You add one by hand inside Edit Flow Event.
• You pull transactions from a linked bank through Plaid and match them to an event.
• You upload a CSV, TSV, or TXT file and match its payments or deposits to an event.

When a transaction is saved, the account balance changes right away. Income adds and Expense subtracts. Resolving the event later does not move the balance a second time.

An event on a flow due on a single date resolves as a whole the moment a payment, deposit, or transfer is matched to it, so it rarely collects more than one transaction. Attaching a receipt records its transactions on the event too, whichever way the flow is due.

See Transactions for manual transactions and Matching and Resolving for bank and file matching.

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Related ideas

• Budget. A workspace that holds one set of accounts, categories, flows, planner, and history. See Budgets.
• Auto Pay. A label saying your bank or biller pays the bill automatically. The app does not pay anything for you. See Flows.
• Match Transactions. The toolbar button and dialog for matching bank or uploaded payments, deposits, and transfers to events. It can pull them through Plaid or use uploaded files, then lets you confirm which events they belong to. See Matching and Resolving.
• Resolve Event. The toolbar button that files the selected event to History. If the event has no transactions, resolving also moves the planned amount through the account balance.
• History. The page where resolved and deleted events are recorded: a tab in most budgets, and the first entry in the More menu of a budget created from receipts. Selecting a row enables Undo Action in the toolbar when the action can be reversed. See History and Undo.
• Pay period. A Planner grouping option. Pay Period Headers uses your income dates as boundaries. It changes how events are grouped on screen; it does not change event dates. See Planner.

Why “Match Transactions” and “Resolve Event,” not “Reconcile”? In many personal finance apps, reconcile means comparing the app’s balance with the bank’s balance and adjusting the gap. Essential Budget uses Match Transactions for connecting payments, deposits, or transfers from your bank or file to planned events, and Resolve Event for filing an event to History. If the app’s balance disagrees with the bank, edit the account’s Current Balance directly.

The day-to-day flow is described in Matching and Resolving.