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.

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.