Glossary

Frequency

How often a bill repeats: weekly, biweekly (every 2 weeks), semimonthly (the 10th & 25th of each month), monthly, annually, or a custom number of days between occurrences. This is a property of the bill itself, independent of your pay period.

Pay period

The stretch between paydays that a forecast is broken into — weekly, biweekly, monthly, or semimonthly. Distinct from a bill’s own frequency: a monthly bill can still fall inside a biweekly pay period, possibly landing in more than one.

Semimonthly (10th & 25th)

A pay period or bill that recurs twice a month, anchored to fixed calendar boundaries — the 1st–9th, 10th–24th, and 25th–end-of-month. Unlike other pay period lengths, semimonthly boundaries don’t shift based on when you started forecasting.

Transaction

A one-off entry in a pay period that isn’t a recurring bill — a bonus, tax refund, or unplanned purchase, entered once rather than on a repeating schedule. Marked as a credit (adds to your balance) or a debit (subtracts from it), checkbook-ledger style, instead of typing a minus sign.

Starting balance

The bank balance you expect to have on a forecast’s start date — the baseline every later pay period’s running balance is calculated forward from.

Now

Your balance as of today — the starting balance plus whatever you’ve actually marked paid or received so far this pay period.

Projected end

The balance you’re expected to have when the current pay period ends, after every bill and income still ahead of you lands.

Tightest point

The lowest balance the forecast expects from today onward — the moment to watch, since it shows how close you come to running short.

Income source

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, unlike a transaction, which is a one-off entry.

Primary income source

The income source whose schedule pre-fills this account’s forecast settings (pay period length and start date) the first time you configure them on the account’s Settings page. Purely a convenience default — it doesn’t limit which income sources are included, and you can still change the settings afterward.

Marking items paid

Checking off a bill or transaction for a specific pay period, and optionally recording its actual amount if it differs from the usual one (e.g. a seasonal utility bill). This never changes the bill’s or transaction’s normal amount — only that one pay period’s record.

Bill history

A pay-period-by-pay-period log of a single bill’s expected vs. actual amounts, completion, and notes over time — useful for spotting bills that consistently run over their usual amount.

Needs reconciliation

Bills from past pay periods that still need to be reconciled — marked paid, and their amount adjusted if it came in different than expected, the same as you would for a bill due this pay period. Most often this means a biller hasn’t actually charged yet, even past its usual due date. Unlike a bill’s own pay period, which stops being editable once it closes, this list keeps showing it for as long as it takes to reconcile, even across a gap of several pay periods — resolving one always updates the pay period it was actually due in, not the current one.

One-time bill

A bill whose start date and end date are the same day only ever occurs once — functionally identical to a one-off transaction, but modeled as a recurring bill. Consider deleting it and recording the expense as a transaction instead, since bills are meant for things that repeat.

Ended bill

A bill whose end date has passed — it no longer applies to any pay period. It’s hidden from the Bills page by default, the same way a paused bill is, so the list doesn’t accumulate dead entries — a “Show ended” toggle brings it back into view for review or deletion.

Category

A label on a bill or transaction — Housing, Groceries, Subscriptions, and so on — from Tally’s one fixed list. Powers the Categories report, which totals your spending by category. See Categorize your spending for how to set one.

Confirmed category

A category that was actually chosen — by you picking it directly, or by accepting a suggestion — as opposed to Tally’s own best guess from the name, which is shown on the Categories report but never saved and never counts as confirmed on its own.

Category suggestion

A category Tally proposes for a bill or transaction as you type its name, with a confidence badge: high confidence (this exact name has been confirmed before) or best guess (a close match, or a keyword-based fallback). See Categorize your spending.

Reserve

An amount held 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 — rather than a single payment. Purchases apply to it instead of hitting your balance on their own. A Tally Plus feature, and only available on a bank-synced account. See Reserves.

Carry-over reserve

A reserve in its default mode: one pot, where whatever’s unspent stays reserved and carries into the next pay period until the reserve is released or its end date arrives.

Repeating reserve

A reserve that gets 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.

Releasing a reserve

Marking a reserve done: whatever’s still held returns to your balance immediately, and no new spending can be applied to it. A released reserve can be reopened at any time.