Track a Spending Reserve

Use a reserve to hold back spending you’ll cover across several purchases, rather than one — “Back to School,” holiday gifts, a vacation fund. It’s a Tally Plus feature, and only available on an account with a connected bank — a manually-tracked account has no synced transactions to apply against a reserve. See Reserves for how carry-over and repeating modes work.

1. Open the account, go to its Plan tab, and expand Reserves. If the account isn’t bank-synced yet, this section points you to connecting a bank instead of the add-reserve form.
2. Select Add a reserve and fill in:
   • Name — e.g. “Back to School”
   • Amount — how much you’re holding back
   • Mode — Carry-over (one pot that carries forward until released) or Repeating (a fresh amount held every pay period)
   • Start date
   • End date (optional) — schedules when the reserve ends; spending can still be applied through the end of that pay period before Tally releases it automatically
3. Save. The reserve now appears as a progress tile on your account’s Dashboard and Forecast for every pay period it’s active in.

Applying purchases to a reserve

A reserve doesn’t count as spending on its own — apply the transactions that actually spend it down:

• Editing a transaction on the Activity page — use the Applies to reserve field.
• Reviewing newly-imported bank transactions — use Apply to a reserve in the review flow.

An applied refund (credit) counts against the reserve’s spend instead of hitting your balance on its own.

Releasing, reopening, and editing

From the Plan tab, select a reserve to change its name, amount, mode, or end date. Use Release when you’re done spending — it returns whatever’s still held to your balance right away and stops new spending from being applied. Reopen brings a released reserve back; if its end date already passed, reopening clears that date too.

Not sure if something is a reserve?

If you’re tracking one purchase, not several building toward an amount held, it’s usually a transaction instead. If it repeats indefinitely on its own schedule rather than being spent down, it’s more likely a bill.