Reserves

A reserve holds an amount out of your projected available balance for spending you know is coming but haven’t itemized yet — “Back to School,” holiday gifts, a vacation fund. Tally never moves money on its own; a reserve just keeps the forecast from showing that amount as spendable until you’ve actually spent it. It’s a Tally Plus feature, and only available on an account with a connected bank — see Tally Plus below.

Carry-over vs. repeating

When you add a reserve, you choose one of two modes:

• Carry-over (the default) — one pot. Whatever’s unspent stays reserved and carries into the next pay period, however many periods that takes, until you release the reserve or its end date arrives.
• Repeating — a fresh amount held every pay period, like a recurring budget. Whatever a period doesn’t spend returns to your balance when that period closes, rather than carrying forward.

Either mode can have an optional end date. Spending can still be applied to the reserve through the end of the pay period the end date falls in — a grace window that catches bank transactions that post a few days late — after which Tally releases it automatically. A repeating reserve’s end date marks the last pay period it gets a fresh amount held in.

Applying spending to a reserve

A reserve itself doesn’t show up as a purchase on your Activity page — it’s held-back balance, not money that moved. Instead, apply the transactions that actually spend it down:

• When editing a transaction on the Activity page, use the Applies to reserve field.
• When reviewing newly-imported bank transactions, use Apply to a reserve right there in the review flow.

An applied credit (a refund) counts against the reserve’s spend rather than its own — the two are never double-counted. Once a reserve is released, no new spending can be applied to it, but transactions already applied stay applied, and you can always remove a transaction from a reserve (even on a free plan — only applying a new one is a paid feature).

Releasing a reserve

Releasing a reserve (“done spending”) returns whatever’s still held to your balance immediately and seals it against new spending. You can reopen a released reserve at any point — reopening one whose end date already passed also clears that date, so it doesn’t just auto-release again on the next forecast pass.

If you spend more than a reserve’s held amount, the overage counts fully against your balance whether the reserve is open or released — nothing is under-counted just because you went over.

Where reserves show up

• Plan — the account’s Plan tab is where you create, edit, and release reserves, alongside its bills and planned transactions.
• Dashboard and Forecast — each open reserve appears as a progress tile at the top of every pay period it’s active in, showing spent vs. held amount. A “View transactions” link jumps to that reserve’s applied spending on Activity.
• Activity — where you apply (and remove) individual purchases against a reserve.

Tally Plus

Creating a reserve, and applying new spending to one, both require Tally Plus and a bank-synced account — a manually-tracked account has no synced transactions to apply against a reserve, so reserves stay unavailable there even with Plus. A free account, or a Plus account you’ve chosen to keep manually tracked, that already has reserves (for example, from before a plan lapsed or a bank connection was removed) keeps seeing them and can still release, reopen, or remove spending from them — it just can’t add new reserves or apply new spending until both conditions are met.