Budgie is a personal finance app for tracking accounts, transactions, budgets, recurring activity, and spending patterns. This guide takes you through the main workflow from initial setup to backups. For deeper explanations, follow the links to the focused guides throughout the page.
1. Complete the initial setup#
When you open Budgie for the first time, the onboarding screens introduce the app and help you choose its initial behaviour.
- Choose your default currency.
- Create your first account, or continue and add accounts later.
- Optionally create a separate cash wallet.
- Choose Simplified or Advanced mode. Simplified mode hides payees and transaction statuses; Advanced mode makes them available.
- Review your choices and finish onboarding.
You can change these options later under Advanced settings.
2. Find your way around Budgie#
The main navigation provides quick access to the everyday areas of the app:
- Dashboard summarises balances, cash flow, budgets, and recent activity.
- Ledger contains your transaction history and balance information.
- Budgets shows spending limits and progress.
- Insights provides summaries, charts, and trends.
Open the side menu for accounts, categories, tags, payees, scheduled items, financial tools, appearance, advanced settings, and information about the app.
3. Create and manage accounts#
Accounts represent where money is held or owed, such as a current account, savings account, credit card, or cash wallet. Open Accounts, select the add action, and provide a name, currency, and opening balance. Optional fields let you choose an icon and colour, add a description or reference, set a default transaction status, or configure projected-balance warnings.
Use the account’s real currency. Budgie can convert combined values into your default currency using the rates configured under Advanced → Exchange Rates.
You can edit, reorder, hide, or archive accounts without removing their history. See Accounts and reconciliation for transfers, statement checking, split purchases, and safe account cleanup.
4. Record income, expenses, and transfers#
Open the Ledger and select the add action:
- Use Expense when money leaves an account and assign an expense category.
- Use Income when money enters an account and assign an income category.
- Use Transfer to move money between two Budgie accounts.
Enter the account, amount, and date, then add a category, payee, tags, status, note, or photo where useful. Record account-to-account movements as transfers instead of matching income and expense entries; this keeps income and spending reports accurate.
5. Search and manage the ledger#
Use the Ledger’s search, filters, and period controls to narrow the transaction list. Open a transaction to review or edit it. Selection tools can apply supported actions to several records at once, but review the selection carefully before changing or deleting it.
Data Explorer provides a more deliberate way to query transactions by period and other criteria, inspect totals, and work with selected results. Be especially careful when deleting one side of a transfer because the two entries are linked.
6. Organise your data#
Give each organising tool a clear purpose:
- Accounts identify where money is held.
- Categories describe the primary purpose of income or spending.
- Payees identify the merchant, employer, person, or organisation involved.
- Tags add flexible context across categories and accounts.
- Statuses support review and reconciliation in Advanced mode.
Consistent names produce clearer searches, budgets, and Insights. The Organising your data guide includes practical naming patterns and bulk-cleanup advice.
7. Plan recurring activity#
Use Scheduled Items for repeating financial activity. A schedule can create transactions automatically, while a bill waits for you to mark each occurrence as paid or skipped. Configure the account, amount, recurrence, start date, and optional reminder, then review upcoming activity from the relevant dashboard and schedule views.
Read Schedules and bills before enabling automatic creation or notifications.
8. Create and monitor budgets#
Create a budget, choose the categories it covers, set its amount, and select the period behaviour that matches your plan. Budgie supports fixed ranges, rolling windows, and anchored repeating periods, with optional rollover where available.
Check a live budget before changing its dates or type because the period boundaries affect which transactions are counted. See Budgets for examples of each budget type.
9. Shape the Dashboard#
The Dashboard brings frequently used information together. Depending on your configuration, it can show account balances, recent income and expenses, cash flow, budgets, categories, payees, scheduled items, and transaction statuses.
Open Customize Dashboard to choose the cards you want and arrange them around your normal review routine. A compact dashboard is often more useful than enabling every available card.
10. Review Insights#
Open Insights, select a reporting period, and move between the available views. Use them to review cash flow, spending pace, income and expense categories, payees, tags, account balances, and transaction sizes.
Charts reflect the records and classifications in your ledger. Check the selected period and tidy inconsistent categories, payees, or transfers before drawing conclusions. Understanding Insights explains what each view measures.
11. Adjust appearance and behaviour#
Use Look & Feel to change visual preferences. Under Advanced, you can manage settings such as Advanced mode, language, exchange rates, chart behaviour, transaction entry preferences, recent-activity ranges, and the horizon used for upcoming bills.
Change one setting at a time if you are experimenting, so its effect is easy to recognise. Some navigation items and transaction fields only appear when Advanced mode is enabled.
12. Back up, restore, export, and import#
Create a Budgie ZIP backup after setup and before importing, restoring, changing devices, or reinstalling. Keep a known-good copy somewhere you control. A restore replaces the current local database; it does not merge with it.
CSV, JSON, and QIF exports are intended for spreadsheets or other software and are not complete restore files. Imports add mapped data to the current database, so keep the source file and check balances and skipped-row messages before continuing.
- Follow Backup, restore, and export for recovery and export steps.
- Follow Importing data for supported formats and validation rules.
- Review Budgie data and security before sharing or storing financial files.
Where to go next#
- Getting started provides a shorter first-session checklist.
- Financial tools explains Budgie’s calculators and scenario tools.
- Troubleshooting covers common balance, import, backup, notification, and display problems.
- Budgie FAQ answers common product and data questions.
- Support explains how to ask for help without exposing sensitive financial information.