Accounts, Bills, and Transactions

Accounts

An account represents a single bank account you want to forecast. Each account has its own bills, income sources, transactions, and forecast — if you track a checking account and a joint account separately, they don’t affect each other’s numbers.

Bills

A bill is anything that costs you money on a repeating schedule: rent, a car payment, a subscription, a utility bill. Each bill has an amount, a due date, and a frequency — weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly, annually, or a custom number of days between occurrences.

A bill’s frequency is independent of your pay period — a monthly bill can still fall inside a biweekly pay period, and might even land in more than one.

If a bill only ever happens once, it’s usually simpler to delete it and record it as a transaction instead — see one-time bill in the glossary.

Income sources

An income source is a recurring deposit — a paycheck, pension, Social Security payment, or gig income — that adds to a pay period’s balance on its own schedule. An account can have several income sources with different amounts and cadences.

The first income source you add becomes your account’s primary income source: it pre-fills your forecast’s pay period length and start date the first time you run a forecast. That’s just a convenience default — you can still add more income sources afterward, or change the forecast settings later.

Transactions

A transaction is a one-off entry in a pay period that isn’t a recurring bill — a bonus, a tax refund, or an unplanned purchase. Each transaction is marked as a credit (adds to your balance) or a debit (subtracts from it), so you never need to type a minus sign.

Marking items paid

Once a bill or transaction’s pay period arrives, you can mark it paid — and, if the actual amount differs from the usual one (a seasonal utility bill running higher, say), record what it actually came out to. This only updates that one pay period’s record; the bill’s normal amount for future pay periods stays the same. See needs reconciliation for what happens if a bill’s due date passes before you’ve marked it paid.