The Dashboard

The Dashboard is the home screen. It shows one month at a time and answers a single question: for every category, how much of what I planned is left?

What's on it

Month selector at the top — jump backward or forward, or tap the month name to open Jump to month (the current month is marked This month). On a touch screen you can also swipe anywhere on the dashboard: drag right for the previous month, drag left for the next one. Scrolling is untouched — a swipe only counts when it travels clearly sideways rather than up and down.
Summary block — total planned income, total planned expenses, total planned savings, and the remaining gap. In a zero-based budget the gap should be zero by month-end.
Category rows, one compact row per active category, grouped under the Income, Expenses and Savings headings. Each row shows:
- The category name and icon.
- The actual amount logged so far and the planned amount for the month, as actual / planned. An expense past its plan shows its actual figure in red.
- A progress bar that fills as transactions land: green for income, blue for savings, and neutral grey for an expense. An expense bar turns red only when the category is over plan, so red always means over and a category at 56% of plan doesn't look like a problem.
Tap a row to open it. The row you tapped stays highlighted (a darker shade and a bar on its left edge) so you can see which one is open, and a panel slides up with:
- Spent and Planned for the month, the progress bar, and what's remaining (or how far over plan you are).
- Add transaction and Edit plan.
- Three tabs: Transactions (this month's transactions in the category), Analytics (spending trends over 3, 6 or 12 months, plus year-to-date), and Manage (rename, change the icon, move it to a group, the planned amount, Edit Details & Recurrence, and Delete Category). Close the panel with ✕, by tapping outside it, or with Escape on a keyboard.
Upcoming bills card — surfaces up to 5 bills coming due in the next 7 days (recurring bills, annual events, debt minimums, one-time bills). A bill past its due date says so in red ("9 days overdue"). Tap View all → to jump to the Bills page. Use the row's ⋯ menu to mark a bill paid, edit a one-time bill's details, or View in Bills, right from the dashboard.
Annual-event Apply chip — a category with an Annual Event renewing this month shows a small 🔔 beside its name. Open the row to find the chip: tap "🔔 +$155 CPL Renewal" to bump that month's planned amount by the renewal amount, or Log it to record the payment. Idempotent — even after a hard reload, an applied event won't show the chip again.
Floating action button (+) in the bottom corner for quick transaction entry.
Floating "Remaining" widget that surfaces only when the month doesn't sum to zero. See Surplus and deficit below.

Collapse the Upcoming bills card

The Upcoming bills card sits at the top of the dashboard, and with five bills on it that can push your Income / Expenses / Savings / Plan Status figures off the bottom of a phone screen.

Tap the Upcoming bills header to fold it away. The header stays, and it keeps a one-line summary that leads with what needs paying: "2 overdue · $2,895.00" if anything is late, otherwise "4 due today · $2,895.00". Collapsing the card never means losing track of a bill. Tap it again to reopen.

Your choice is remembered on that device. It's a display preference, not a setting on your budget: collapsing it on your laptop won't collapse it on your phone, it doesn't change anything on the Bills page, and it doesn't affect reminders.

Filtering the category list

The Filter button, on the same row as the Budget Breakdown heading, holds two ways to narrow the list:

Search by name — type a few letters to jump to a category.
Show — one of All categories, Under budget (spent less than planned) or Over budget (spent more than planned).

Over budget is the quick answer to "where did I go over?" — it leaves just the categories past their planned amount, each showing what it went over by. Under budget is the mirror image, and the list you want when you're deciding where a purchase can come from.

Both are about expense categories only. Coming in above target on income or savings is also "more than planned", but that's a good month rather than something to fix, so those categories stay out of both. A group with nothing matching says "No categories match the filter" rather than looking empty.

The button tells you when it's doing something: it turns coloured and shows a count of how many filters are on. Open it and tap Clear to see everything again. (That matters — a filter you've forgotten about looks exactly like missing categories.)

On a phone, Sort by and Sync planned amounts live inside this popover too — the row above doesn't have space for them beside the heading.

Reading the progress bar

A progress bar fills as transactions hit the category. The math is the same on every type:

Expense category — actual / planned. Full bar means you've spent everything you planned.
Income category — actual / planned. Full bar means you've earned everything you planned.
Savings category — actual / planned. Full bar means you've moved everything you planned to savings.

The bar's color is a soft signal, not a rule. A red Groceries bar on the 28th of the month is fine. A red Groceries bar on the 5th is not.

Edit a planned amount

On the Dashboard, tap the category's row.
Tap Edit plan (or the Planned figure itself) and type the new amount. Starting with + or − adjusts it instead — +50 adds $50 to the current plan.
Press ✓ (or Enter) to save.

This only changes the current month. The category's default amount and other months stay untouched. If you want a permanent change, edit the default in Categories.

Switch months

Tap the month selector at the top to jump to a specific month.
Use the arrows on either side to step one month at a time.

You can plan months in advance — useful for upcoming irregular months like December or tax months. Future months pre-fill from each category's default amount and recurrence schedule.

Surplus and deficit (the floating Remaining widget)

A zero-based budget should sum to zero — total planned income minus total planned expenses minus total planned savings should land at $0. When it doesn't, a floating widget appears at the bottom of the Dashboard with a one-tap action.

Surplus (green, "+$X left to plan"): you have unassigned dollars. Tap Assign to push the remaining amount into a category's planned amount for the current month.
Deficit (red, "−$X over"): you've planned more than your income covers. Tap Reduce Plan to pick a category and trim its planned amount by the over-assignment delta. The modal pre-fills the full delta but you can edit it before confirming, or tap Max to snap back to the full amount.

Both actions only change the current month's plan. The category's default amount and other months stay untouched. The Reduce Plan modal only lists expense and savings categories with a planned amount above $0 (sorted largest first); income categories and hidden categories aren't reducible from this UI.

If you'd rather edit a specific category directly, tap any category row on the Dashboard and use Edit plan — same effect, just more targeted.

Carrying a month forward

A zero-based month rarely lands exactly on zero. If August ends with money you never spent, that money is real — it's still in your account — but without carryover it simply disappears when the month rolls over, and September starts as though it never existed.

When you open a month whose predecessor left something over, the Dashboard offers it:

August left $412.00 unspent. Carry it forward → (Carry forward)

One tap and those dollars become assignable in the new month, through the same Assign action described above.

Once carried, a note under the four summary cards confirms it with the line "$231.00 overspend carried from Jul" (or "$412.00 surplus carried from Jul" when the carried figure is a surplus). A green check appears only for a surplus; an overspend gets an amber warning mark instead, because a success tick next to an overspend says the wrong thing. To undo it, tap the Undo button at the end of that line. It asks before removing. (The offer itself disappears once you've accepted it; there's no need for a banner repeating a number the note is already showing.)

The month you carried from settles too. Go back to July and the floating Plan Gap pill no longer says over-assigned with a Reduce Plan button — the gap has already gone into August. It reads "$231.00 overspend carried into Aug" with a green check and an Open Aug button, the note under the summary cards carries the same line, and July stops offering to carry June in — accepting that now would change the figure August was built on. If July's figures change later, the same pill says now $X and sends you to August, where the offer to update the carry lives.

It uses money you actually have, not money you planned to have. The figure is built from real income and real spending, so it can't offer you $400 that only ever existed in a plan.

Overspent months carry too. If August ended $180 in the red, the offer reads "August overspent by $180.00 — carry it forward?" and carrying it starts September $180 down. That's deliberate: if only good months carried, the running figure would climb forever and stop matching your bank balance.

Spending what you carried settles the books. Carry $412 into September and spend it, and September carries nothing forward — not a $412 deficit. The calculation always includes what came in, so using the money you were told you had is never punished.

Nothing happens on its own. The app offers; you decide. If you later edit a transaction in the source month, the figure is not silently rewritten — the card tells you it changed and offers to update it.

Carryover is not income. It's counted as its own thing in the budget maths, which matters more than it sounds: recording leftover money as an income transaction (the usual workaround) inflates your income history and understates your savings rate for that month. That's precisely what this feature exists to avoid — so don't do both.

When the dashboard looks empty

If a category isn't showing for the current month, one of three things is true:

The category is archived — open Categories to unarchive it.
The category's active months don't include this month — useful for things like a quarterly subscription.
The category is on vacation mode — see the Vacation mode article.

What's next

Categories — types, recurrence, defaults, and how active months work.
Transactions — add, edit, find, and delete.
Bill Reminders — the Overdue / Pay today / This week / Later queue the Upcoming bills card links to.
Annual Events — what feeds the Apply-to-budget chip on category rows.