How Balanced Money works
Five minutes here will save you a lot of poking around. This page stays put — come back whenever something isn't behaving the way you expected.
The idea
Most people trying to get a grip on their money end up building a spreadsheet, then quietly abandoning it around month three. Balanced Money is that spreadsheet with the boring parts already done: the structure, the formulas, and the charts.
You still bring the numbers. What you don't have to do is decide how to organise them.
The rhythm
Five steps, always in this order. The order is the part that matters; how often you sit down is up to you.
Once a month is the natural fit, because that's how bank statements arrive and how the budget and balance sheets are laid out. But every few months works too — you'll just have more rows to categorise in one go, and the gaps will show as flat stretches in the charts. The first pass takes a while; after that it's about ten minutes each time.
Import last month's statement
Download a CSV from your bank and drop it into Transactions. Rows you've already imported are detected and skipped, so overlapping exports are safe. If it goes wrong, the whole batch can be undone in one click.
Categorise what came in
Give each row a category. Filter to "uncategorised only" and work down the list; select several rows and set them together when they're all the same. This is the step everything else depends on — an uncategorised transaction is invisible to your budget and your charts.
Read the budget
Open Budget and compare the two columns. Budget is what you intended; Actual is what the statement says. The gap is the interesting part — and it's usually in Discretionary.
Update your balances
On Balance, put in this month's figures for your accounts, investments, property and debts. It's the one bit of manual typing that stays manual — and it's what makes the net-worth trend real rather than guessed.
Look at the dashboard
Dashboard needs no input — it's built from the four steps above. One month tells you little. Six months tells you almost everything.
What each section is for
Transactions
Where your real spending arrives. Export a CSV from your bank, drop it in, and tag each row with a category. Imports come in batches you can undo, and duplicate rows are spotted for you.
Budget
What you meant to spend, month by month, split into Fixed, Variable and Discretionary. Once transactions are categorised, the actual column fills itself in beside your plan.
Balance
What you own and what you owe, sorted by how soon it matters — current, medium-term and long-term. The bottom line is your net worth.
Dashboard
The read-only view. Cash flow, savings rate, spending by category and net worth over time — all of it drawn from the months you've filled in elsewhere.
Plan
The long view. Project income, spending, property and pensions decades ahead to see whether the money lasts. Independent of your month-to-month figures.
Settings
Currency and number format, which charts appear, your categories and accounts — plus a full export of your data and a permanent delete, whenever you want them.
How the pieces feed each other
There's one direction of flow worth remembering: transactions fill the budget, and the budget and balance fill the dashboard. Categorise a transaction and it lands in the matching budget row's Actual column; the dashboard then draws its cash-flow and spending-by-category charts from those figures.
Which is why an empty dashboard is almost never a bug. It means the months behind it are empty — or the transactions are in, but nobody has told them what they are.
Balance is the exception: it stands alone. Nothing populates it automatically, and nothing else depends on it except the net-worth charts.
Your data
Balanced Money never connects to your bank. There's no Open Banking link and no third party with read access to your accounts — the only way figures get in is a CSV you export yourself, or typing.
Everything you've entered can be exported as JSON from Settings, and deleting your account really deletes it — rows removed, not flagged.