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.

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.