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The Basics

Finralis uses envelope budgeting. Every dollar lives in an account (checking, savings, a credit card) and is given a job in a budget, like Rent, Groceries or Savings.

Your budgets should add up to your bank and card balances. When they don't, usually right after a paycheck, the Dashboard shows the difference as Unallocated until you put it in budgets.

Investment accounts and loans sit outside budgets. They count toward your net worth, not toward what you budget.

Getting Started

Setup walks you through it the first time you sign in. Add your accounts, then pick how to start:

• Build My Plan (recommended): your pay, bills and everyday spending, then My Plan turns them into budgets, an emergency fund and what each paycheck covers. Last, you put today's money in your budgets.
• Just My Budgets: your own budgets, or Simple Start's Emergency Fund, Savings, Needs and Wants. You can build a plan anytime from Plan.

Nothing is saved until you finish, but your answers are kept as you go, so a refresh or Skip Setup doesn't lose them. Setting up by hand instead:

1. 1Add your accounts on Accounts, with each one's current balance.
2. 2Create your budgets on Budgets. Not sure where to start? Try Emergency Fund, Savings, Needs and Wants.
3. 3Allocate your money. Click Unallocated on the Dashboard and spread it across your budgets.
4. 4Record transactions as they happen, so your accounts and budgets stay in step.

My Plan

My Plan works out what each paycheck covers. It's free, under Plan. Its builder has five steps:

• Income: your take-home pay, how often you're paid and your next payday.
• Expenses: your bills and everyday spending, grouped by budget. Essential is your bare-bones month; Flexible is what Tune can adjust.
• Goals: Ongoing Saving (like retirement) is funded first, then reserves and goals. Each goal shares what's left, has a date, or gets a set amount.
• Tune: one slider trades Flexible spending for reaching goals sooner.
• Review: everything that will be created or changed, before anything is saved.

Each paycheck: every expense gets the same share of each paycheck, so a budget fills between bills. When pay arrives, Fill from Plan on Allocate fills in the split for you to check before any money moves. Money no goal can take shows as Not Planned and stays unallocated.

Planned Savings Rate counts only the budgets marked as savings in Settings (and contributions to investment accounts marked there), so it's comparable to the dashboard's Savings Rate.

Thirty days after setup, Check Your Estimates compares the suggested amounts you kept with what you actually spent. Removing your plan keeps your expenses, budgets and goals, and undoes only what the plan did: its pay schedule and Tune's changes.

Transactions

You can edit or delete any transaction. Deleting one reverses its effect, and you can restore it from the account's history.

After a paycheck: record it as Income, then use Allocate (from Budgets or the Dashboard) to spread it across your budgets. Keeping the two steps apart lets you decide where each paycheck goes.

Accounts

• Bank: checking and savings. Part of your budget.
• Credit: credit cards. The balance is what you owe; a card you pay in full each month isn't counted as debt.
• Investment: brokerage, IRAs, 401(k)s and more. Counted in net worth, not budgets. Spending paid straight from one (an HSA, say) or from a loan has no budget, since that money was never in your budgets; it still counts as spending.
• Loan: car, student, mortgage. Once one reaches $0 you can mark it Paid off.

Changing a balance from the edit screen is logged as an adjustment, so the history stays complete. Deleting an account removes it from your lists but keeps its history, so past net worth stays accurate. Once an account has history, it can switch between bank and credit, but not to or from investment or loan; add a new account instead.

Expenses

Expenses is a list of what you pay regularly: bills, subscriptions and everyday spending like groceries (weekly, monthly or yearly). It never moves money: when a charge happens, record it as an Expense transaction.

• Link each one to a budget, and the Allocate page suggests how much to set aside.
• Mark each one Essential or Flexible. Essential expenses are your bare-bones spending for the emergency fund.

Investments

From Investments, log a value update whenever an account's value changes, a contribution when you move money in from a bank account, and a withdrawal when you take some out. Investments sit outside your budgets, so a contribution comes out of the budget you choose, and a withdrawal lands in Unallocated, ready to put in one. Neither counts as market growth.

Automatic daily updates from your brokerage come with Plus. Coming soon

Analytics

The Analytics overview shows your net worth and the health of your budget at a glance. Budget Analytics and Investment Analytics go deeper; use the buttons at the top to pick the period. Definitions explains every number.

Your Data

Download everything as Excel or CSV from Profile → Account → Export your data. You can delete your account there too; it's permanent. See the Privacy Policy for what we store and why.