Money ready

A budget built out of your own bank statements, and the honest annual number underneath it. Without handing anybody a bank login.

What it does today

• A budget worked out from your own bank statements, rather than twelve numbers you have to invent. Upload two or three months and the form arrives already filled in, with every figure yours to argue with.
• The PDF statement works, which matters because it is the file most people actually have. So do CSV and Quicken (QFX) downloads if you know where to find them.
• Your name, your address and your account number are taken out of a PDF before the app reads a single line of it - not before it is sent somewhere, before it is read at all. Most statements are then read entirely on our own server with nothing sent anywhere, and you are told plainly which of those happened to yours.
• It shows the range as well as the average. A category that averaged 612 a month but ran from 410 to 980 gets marked as uneven, because that is an annual bill hiding inside a monthly average and budgeting the average would be wrong every single month.
• Targets are rounded up, never down. A budget set slightly under what you reliably spend is one you fail every month, and a budget failed every month gets deleted.
• Categories are worked out for you, and one correction teaches it for good: change where one shop belongs and every other line from that shop moves with it, on this statement and on every one you add later.
• The same statement can be uploaded twice, or three overlapping months at once, without anything being counted twice.
• Money moved to savings or used to pay a card is recognised as moved rather than spent, so being sensible does not show up as a bad month.
• Yearly and quarterly bills are shown as what they cost per month to be ready for, so the ones that wreck a month when they land stop being a surprise.
• How last month went, once, honestly. Only complete months are ever compared, because half a month measured against a full budget flatters everybody.
• One number: what a year of your life actually costs. Everything recurring is annualised, everything one off in the last twelve months is added at face value, and the line underneath always shows what the total is made of.
• Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly costs all sit in one list and are converted properly, so a quarterly bill and a monthly one can finally be compared.
• A one off is counted for twelve months and then drops out on its own. A new roof is real money this year and a lie about next year.
• Changing an amount is never an overwrite. The old figure, the new figure and the date are kept, which is what lets the app tell you what went up, when, and by how much a year.
• Things can be stopped rather than deleted, so a total from last year still adds up when you look at it again.
• Nothing is connected to a bank. A statement is read once and thrown away: no bank login, no read access to your account, nothing syncing in the background, and no file of yours left sitting on a disk afterwards.

Why it is built this way

One refusal is the product: no bank connection, ever. That is not only about privacy, though there is no access to revoke and nothing to breach. It is also most of the reason the good budgeting apps cost around a hundred dollars a year, because somebody is being paid a fee for every account every month to keep that sync alive. Reading a statement you already have costs nothing, so the saving goes to you rather than to a data aggregator. What it costs you is a few minutes once a month instead of a live balance, and a live balance was never the part that changed anybody behaviour. The other half is that the budget is proposed rather than demanded. Nobody sits down and invents twelve numbers, and the ones people do invent are aspirations they fail by week three. Your own history already knows what you spend.