Forecasting

A forecast answers one question: what will my balance be after each upcoming bill and paycheck?

Pay periods

Tally breaks your forecast into pay periods — the stretch between paydays. You choose a pay period length for each account: weekly, biweekly, monthly, or semimonthly. This is separate from any individual bill’s own frequency; a monthly bill doesn’t need a monthly pay period, and can land inside more than one biweekly pay period.

Semimonthly pay periods are a special case — instead of shifting based on when you started forecasting, they’re anchored to fixed calendar boundaries: the 1st–9th, 10th–24th, and 25th–end of month.

Starting balance

Every forecast starts from a starting balance — the bank balance you expect to have on the forecast’s start date. Every later pay period’s running balance is calculated forward from that number: each pay period adds its income and transaction credits, then subtracts its bills and transaction debits.

Forecast settings

Starting balance, start date, pay period length, and forecast range are configured on the account’s Settings page, not the Forecast page itself — the Forecast page just reads them and shows the result. If they haven’t been set up yet, the Forecast page tells you to add them on Settings first.

How far out the forecast runs is a range measured from today, not a fixed end date you pick — a saved calendar date would immediately start going stale the moment “today” moves past it. Free accounts get a 1-year range; paid accounts can choose 1, 3, 5, or 10 years from a dropdown on the Settings page.

Reading the forecast

For each pay period, the forecast shows:

• Which bills, income, and transactions fall in that period
• The period’s net change (income and credits minus bills and debits)
• The running balance at the end of the period

A pay period with a negative running balance is Tally’s way of telling you, ahead of time, that something needs to change — move a bill, add income, or adjust a transaction — before that period actually arrives.