Learn - Getting Started

From sign-in to your first matched transaction.

Getting Started

This guide walks you through your first 30 minutes with Essential Budget: the Welcome modal that opens on first sign-in, creating your first budget, adding the accounts and categories you’ll work with, adding the bills and paychecks that repeat, and looking at the planner once everything is in place. It also covers installing the app on your phone or computer so you can launch it like a native app.

A new budget starts out empty. The app does not pre-fill accounts, categories, or items for you. You add them yourself in the steps below.

Your first time signing in

The first time you open Essential Budget after creating an account, the Welcome to Essential Budget! modal opens automatically. It runs through three short screens (an intro, a “Plan / Adapt / Relax” overview, and a choice screen), and then asks how you’d like to start.

You have two paths:

Start with Sample Budget (the Recommended option). The app creates a ready-made personal budget you can explore and modify: one Checking account with a starter balance, around 30 categories grouped by Housing, Transportation, Food, Insurance, Healthcare, Services, Entertainment, and Transfers, and around 30 recurring items including a weekly paycheck, monthly insurance premiums, subscriptions, and a savings transfer. The schedules are dated to start from today, so the planner is populated as soon as the budget opens. After it’s created, you land on the Planner for that budget.
Start from Scratch. The Welcome modal closes and the Create Budget dialog opens immediately, ready for you to name a brand-new empty budget and pick its theme and icon set. Steps 1 through 4 below cover what to do next.

If you pick the Sample Budget path, the modal asks you to Customize Your Budget with a theme and an icon set before saving. The defaults are a clean blue palette and a minimal icon set; you can tap Browse all themes… or Browse all icon sets… to pick something else from the community library, or just keep the defaults and change them later from Edit Budget. See Themes and Icons.

Why this default? The Welcome modal opens once. The first time you close it, in any way (Sample Budget, Start from Scratch, or the X button), the app remembers that you’ve seen it and won’t show it again, even when you sign in later on a different device. Everything the modal offers is reachable from the Budgets page after that: tap Create Budget to start a new one, or open the Sample Budget you created. The flag is per account, not per device.

If you change your mind about the Sample Budget, you can delete it any time from the Budgets page and create a fresh one in its place.

Returning to an empty app

If you’ve signed in before and don’t have any budgets right now (you deleted your only budget, or you just signed up but skipped the Welcome modal without creating one), the Create Budget dialog opens automatically the next time you open the app. This is intentional: with zero budgets, there’s nothing else to look at, so the app puts the create flow front and center. Cancel out of the dialog if you want to look around first; the rest of the app works the same way it does for every other user.

Before you reached this point, the sign-in page asked you to confirm that you’re 18 or older, a United States resident, and aware that all currency values in the app are in US dollars, and to accept the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Billing Policy. The app is currently US-only and dollars-only; the legal pages on eb.app are the canonical place to re-read what you agreed to. There’s no in-app dialog that re-prompts for consent later. If you’d like to set a username for community publishing, that’s a separate (optional) step covered on Your Account.

What is a budget?

A budget in Essential Budget is your workspace. It holds your accounts, your categories, your planner, and your history, all in one place. You can have more than one budget if you want to keep things separate, like a personal budget and one you share with a partner. Most people only ever need one.

Each calendar month, you can use up to 3 budget creation slots on the free plan, or up to 10 on Premium. Deleting a budget in the same calendar month frees one of that month’s slots, so the limit is on your net new budgets for the month, not the total number you keep. See Budgets for the full picture.

To make a new budget yourself, open the Budgets page and tap the Create Budget button. You’ll be asked to give it a name, and you can choose between two ways to set it up:

Set it up yourself. You start with an empty budget and add the rest in the steps below. This guide covers this path.
Let the app do the first pass. Available on Premium. The app reads a CSV from your bank, or pulls from a linked bank account, and builds a starter budget for you with categories and recurring items already in place.

After you save, the app drops you into your new budget. You’ll see four tabs at the bottom of the screen: Setup, Planner, Reports, and History. The Setup tab is where you start. (See Opening a budget for how the app picks which tab to land on once a budget is fully set up.)

Why does a new budget start empty? Because the right starting accounts and categories are different for everyone. If the app pre-filled categories you don’t use, you’d have to clean them up before you could trust the planner. Starting from a blank workspace is faster and avoids surprises later.

Step 1: Add your accounts

An account is a place your money lives, like your checking account or a savings account. Open the Setup tab. The page opens with Accounts selected in the segment at the top. Tap the add button on the right side of the toolbar.

The New Account dialog opens. Fill in three things:

Account Name. A name you’ll recognize at a glance. “Chase Checking” beats “Account 1.”
Account Type. Either Checking or Savings.
Current Balance. Whatever your bank shows the account at, right now.

Once you save, the current balance becomes the starting point for that account. From then on, every transaction you record adjusts it. As long as the number you typed in matches your bank today, the running balance in the app keeps matching your bank’s.

You can edit the current balance later. If the app’s number ever drifts away from your bank’s, open the account and update it. Your bank is the source of truth; the number in the app follows your bank, not the other way around.

You don’t need to add every account today. Two or three is plenty to get going.

Why is the balance still editable later? Because banks and apps occasionally fall out of sync, and when they do, you should be the one to decide how to fix it. The app won’t quietly change the balance for you, because that could hide a transaction you forgot to add.

Step 2: Add your categories

Categories are the buckets you sort your spending and income into. Still in the Setup tab, tap Categories in the segment at the top, then tap the add button.

A new budget has no categories until you add them. Most people start with five to ten and add more as they go. Pick the ones you actually want to track, not every possible thing you spend money on.

The New Category dialog opens. Fill in:

A name like “Housing” or “Groceries.”
A type: Income, Expense, or Transfer. The type tells the app whether something in this bucket adds money to your account or takes it out.
An optional parent, if you want to nest this category inside another one. “Groceries” inside “Food” is a common example.

Income, Expense, and Transfer are the only three types. Every item you create later belongs to one category, and the category’s type controls which way the money moves. (For the full breakdown, see Categories.)

You can delete a category from the Categories segment any time. If it has sub-categories nested under it, you’ll be asked to remove those first. If items are using the category, you can either reassign them to another category or let them be deleted along with it. Anyone with edit access on the budget can delete categories.

Step 3: Add the things that repeat

An item is anything that happens on a schedule: rent, your paycheck, a phone bill, a streaming subscription, a weekly grocery budget. Tap Items in the segment at the top of the Setup tab, then tap the add button.

The Add Item dialog opens. Fill in:

An Item Name (“Rent”, “Paycheck”, “Spotify”).
A Category from the list you set up in Step 2.
An Account the money comes from or goes into. If it’s a transfer between two accounts, you’ll pick a From Account and a To Account instead.
A Schedule, where you set the amount, how often it happens, and when it starts. You can pick Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annually, Annually, or Custom.
For things other than transfers, a Transaction Tracking toggle. Leave it off for fixed bills that one transaction will settle (rent, Netflix). Turn it on for spending you build up over many transactions (groceries, gas).

A few examples to anchor it:

For rent, you might add a Rent item, set the amount to $1,800.00, choose Housing as the category, pick the account it pays from, and set it to repeat monthly on the 1st. Transaction Tracking off.
For your paycheck, add a Paycheck item, set the amount to $2,500.00, choose Income as the category, pick the account it lands in, and set it to repeat every two weeks starting on your next payday. Transaction Tracking off.
For Spotify, add a Spotify item at $15.99, choose Subscriptions, pick the account it bills, and set it to repeat monthly on whatever day they charge you. Transaction Tracking off.
For groceries, add a Groceries item with a planned amount of $400.00, choose Groceries, pick the account you use, and set it to repeat weekly on your usual shopping day. Transaction Tracking on, because you’ll spend it across many small transactions.

The first three are fixed bills: one transaction settles the line. The fourth tracks a budget you spend over time.

Add the items you’d be embarrassed to forget. The planner fills in the dates the moment you save each one.

Step 4: Look at the planner

Tap the Planner tab at the bottom of the screen. The items you saved in Step 3 are now showing up as events, dated according to each item’s schedule.

Each row shows the event’s details and a projected running balance for the account it touches. The projected balance is the app’s best guess at what your account will look like after each scheduled event happens. It’s an estimate based on what you’ve planned, not a record of money that’s already moved.

This is usually the moment the setup feels worth it. The planner shows you what’s coming.

What happens in the first week

Two patterns come up early.

A bill you planned for goes through. When the matching bank transaction comes in, you have two ways to record it:

If you’ve linked your bank, tap the Match button on the Planner toolbar to pull new transactions and open the Match Transactions dialog. Match the transaction to the planned event and confirm. Matching resolves the event: your balance updates, and the record moves to History.
If you haven’t linked your bank, tap the planned event on the Planner to open the Edit Item Event dialog. Add the transaction inside the dialog, then save. Resolve the event from the Planner toolbar (or, if it’s a tracked item, it resolves on its own once the transactions add up to the planned amount).

Either way, the result is the same: the event resolves, your balance adjusts, and the record moves to History.

You realize you forgot something. Open the Items segment of the Setup tab, add the missing item, and the Planner picks up its events right away.

For the full mechanics of matching, resolving, and the difference between fixed bills and tracked spending, see Matching and Resolving.

What you can take back

Most setup mistakes are easy to fix.

You can delete items, accounts, and categories from the Setup tab. Categories with sub-categories want you to clean those out first. Deleting an account also removes the items attached to it. Deleting a category lets you reassign its items to another category, or delete them along with it.
Anything resolved on the History tab has an Undo Action button. Undoing puts the event back on the Planner at its original date and reverses the balance change it caused.

Undo can’t always restore the original state. It will tell you, instead of guessing, in any of these cases:

The item the event came from has been deleted.
The item’s schedule has been changed since you resolved the event.
The account or category the event used has been deleted.
The event was resolved long enough ago that the app no longer has the information needed to undo it.

When that happens, History tells you why and leaves the record in place. Nothing is damaged, but you’ll need to recreate the situation manually if you still want to. (History and Undo has the full picture.)

Install the app

Essential Budget is a web app, so you don’t need an App Store or Play Store install. Adding it to your home screen, dock, or taskbar gets you a real app icon and a full-screen launch experience, just like a native app.

The fastest path: open the hamburger menu and tap Install App at the top. The Install App dialog opens with the right steps for whatever device and browser you’re on. If your browser supports a one-tap install, the dialog has an Install App button that does it directly. Otherwise it shows the manual steps. The button is hidden once the app is already installed.

If you’d rather work from outside the app, here are the manual paths.

On iPhone or iPad (Safari). Apps can only be installed from Safari on iOS. If you’re in Chrome or Firefox on iOS, copy the URL and open it in Safari first. Then:

Tap the Share button in the toolbar.
Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
Tap Add in the top right.

The app icon appears on your home screen. Open it from there to launch in full-screen mode.

On Android (Chrome). Chrome usually shows an in-app install prompt the first time you visit. If you tap Install App in the hamburger menu, the system install dialog opens immediately. If the prompt has already been dismissed, install manually:

Tap the menu button (three dots) in the browser.
Tap Install app or Add to Home screen.
Tap Install to confirm.
Find the app in your app drawer and drag it to your home screen.

On a desktop computer. Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers can install the app as a desktop window. Tap Install App in the hamburger menu to trigger the browser’s install prompt directly, or look for the install icon at the right edge of the address bar (a small computer with a down arrow) and click it. On Safari 17 and later, the menu bar’s File menu has an Add to Dock entry. Firefox doesn’t install web apps on desktop; bookmark the site or pin the tab, or open Essential Budget in Chrome or Edge for the full app-window experience.

Once installed, signing in on the installed app is the same as on the website; your data is the same account.

Bring Your Own AI for free

Several places in the app have an AI mode (creating a budget, matching transactions, generating a theme). You don’t need a Premium subscription to use them. Each AI dialog has a Bring Your Own AI toggle that switches to a copy-and-paste flow: the app generates a prompt for you, you paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other tool you already use, and you paste the response back. The AI work happens on your own subscription, so the app charges nothing.

If you’d rather have the app do the AI work for you, the Integrated AI mode is part of Premium. See Subscription for what each path sends, what stays local, and how the included Premium Subscriber Credits cover Integrated AI.

Free and Premium

Two plans are available.

The free plan covers everything described in this guide: accounts, categories, items, the Planner, History, and Undo. You can use up to 3 budget creation slots each calendar month.

The Premium plan adds:

Budget Sharing. Keep up to 5 people on a budget’s direct sharing list, including owners and pending invitations.
Integrated AI Budget Creation and Reconciliation. Have the app build a complete budget from a CSV or your linked bank data, and have it match incoming transactions to your planned events for you.
Bank Account Linking. Connect your bank accounts so Match can pull recent transactions from your bank.
AI Theme Generation. Generate custom themes with AI so your budget looks the way you want it to.
Community Publishing. Publish themes and public budgets to the community. Public budgets can’t be made from accounts you’ve linked to a bank, so your real bank data is never published.
Increased Limits. Up to 10 budget creation slots per calendar month, plus higher AI limits.

Pricing and the full plan comparison live on the Subscription page. The cancel and account-deletion flows are on Your Account.

Quick reference

Step	Where	What you set	Time
1	Setup tab, Accounts segment	Account Name, Account Type (Checking or Savings), Current Balance	About 2 minutes per account
2	Setup tab, Categories segment	Name, type (Income, Expense, or Transfer), optional parent	About 5 minutes
3	Setup tab, Items segment	Item Name, Category, Account, Schedule, Transaction Tracking	About 2 minutes per item
4	Planner tab	Nothing. The events show up automatically.	30 seconds

If you’ve been reading longer than it would take to set up, close the guide and start setting up. The app is more useful with five minutes of your real numbers in it than with thirty minutes of thinking about it.

Budgets: the management surface for the budgets you create here, including the open-budget routing rule and the per-month creation cap.
Your Account: your username and profile, full-budget Backup and Restore, the Sign Out and Delete Account flows.
Subscription: the free vs Premium picture, how the AI features and credits work, and what changes when Premium ends.
Matching and Resolving: the Match and Resolve flow once your bank transactions start coming in.
Bank Linking: connecting your bank accounts on Premium.
Themes and Icons: changing the colors and icons on a budget, including the Customize step in the Welcome modal.
History and Undo: the full undo failure-mode list and the 5-year history retention.