Budgets

The Budgets screen lets you set a monthly spending cap on a category and keep an eye, over the course of the month, on how much you have spent against that cap. For example: "this month I don't want to go over €300 on Eating out" or "€150 max on Leisure". Cuéntamo adds up your real expenses in that category and shows a progress bar with a traffic light (green, amber, red) so you can tell at a glance whether you have plenty of room, whether you are getting close to the limit, or whether you have already gone over.

Budgets are always monthly and always about spending (you don't budget income). Each budget is tied to one category, and the same amount applies to every month: you don't have to recreate them each month, the cap is reused and the counter resets to zero when a new month begins.

The month selector

At the top right you choose which month you are looking at. You always start on the current month. Use the ‹ and › arrows to move back or forward one month; you can also click the month name to open a calendar and jump straight to any month, changing the year with its arrows.

You cannot move into future months: the › arrow is disabled on the current month and upcoming months appear greyed out in the calendar (a budget is "spent" through real transactions, and those don't exist yet). If you have wandered off to a past month, a "Today" link brings you back to the current one. Changing the month only changes what you see as spent; the budget itself (the cap, the threshold, the category) is the same across every month.

Creating a budget

Click "+ New budget" at the top right (or, if you don't have any yet, the big "Create budget" button in the middle of the screen). A form opens with these fields:

• Category. The expense category you want to cap. Only expense categories are offered (income ones don't appear) and only those that don't already have a budget (see below).
• Monthly amount. The cap in euros that you don't want to exceed each month. It must be a number greater than 0.
• Alert threshold. A slider from 10% to 100% (80% by default). It sets the percentage of the budget at which you want the traffic light to turn amber ("near the limit"). With 80%, as soon as you spend €240 of a €300 cap the budget goes amber.
• Scope. Only shown if you have the freelance module enabled. It decides whether the cap counts Personal spending, Freelance spending, or Both. More on this below.
• Active. A checkbox to keep the budget running or leave it paused. It is ticked when you create it.

Once saved, the budget appears in the list with its progress bar already calculated for the month you are viewing.

Suggesting budgets from what you already spend

If you don't know what figure to give each category, press “Suggest budgets”, next to “+ New budget” (or in the middle of the screen if you don't have any yet). Cuéntamo looks at what you've spent and suggests a budget for each variable-spending category: groceries, restaurants, leisure, clothes…

• Based on which period. By default, the last 3 months. In the drop-down you can pick the last 6 or 12 months, or a specific year (“All of 2025”, “2026 so far”). If you started recording halfway through the period, the average only uses the months you have: it isn't divided by months when you weren't using Cuéntamo yet.
• What each row shows. The category, what you spend on average per month and, if a recurring item already forecasts part of it, how much your recurring items forecast and how much you spend outside them. The suggested amount is that average rounded up to the nearest ten (with recurring items, what they forecast plus what you spend outside them: the budget discounts what's already forecast, so anything less would add nothing to the forecast), and you can change it.
• What doesn't appear. Categories that already have a budget, those almost fully covered by your recurring items (electricity, rent: a budget there adds nothing to the forecast; but if you also spend on it outside your recurring items, like everyday pharmacy purchases in Health alongside your health insurance, it does appear), one-off spending and very small amounts. Transfers and transactions you've marked as not counting as spending don't count either.

They all start ticked: untick the ones you don't want, adjust the amounts and press “Create N budgets”. They are created as monthly budgets that count in the forecast, and their expected spending appears in the Forecast straight away. You can undo it with Ctrl+Z like any other change.

It's the same thing the welcome wizard offers in the “Your variable spending” step when you import your history on sign-up.

One category, one budget

Each category can have at most one active budget. That is why, when you create a new one, the category dropdown hides the ones that are already budgeted: this way you don't end up with two different caps fighting over the same category. If you want to change the cap of a category that already has a budget, edit it instead of creating another.

If you need to budget a category again after having paused it, reactivate it (it reclaims its slot) or delete it and create a new one. To group several expenses under a single cap, the way to go is concept classification: bring those expenses into a single category and budget that one.

How spending is calculated

The "spent" figure of each budget is the sum of your real expense transactions in that category within the selected month. Specifically, Cuéntamo adds up the transactions that meet all of the following:

• They are of expense type (income does not subtract from the budget).
• They are confirmed (real), not forecast. A future expense generated by a recurring template does not consume budget until it is confirmed as real.
• They belong to the budget's category.
• They fall within the month you are viewing (from the 1st to the last day).
• They match the budget's scope (personal, freelance or both).
• They are not excluded from income/expense: an expense you have matched with its refund (you got your money back) stops counting toward the budget, just like movements on a scratch account. Only the real net expense uses up the budget.

The amount is used as an absolute value, so it doesn't matter how the expense is signed. Since only real transactions count, the figure you see is "what you have actually spent", not an estimate. If you want to project spending through to the end of the month, that reading is in the Forecast.

The progress bar and the traffic light

Each budget shows a progress bar that fills up according to the percentage spent, plus a numeric percentage (it can go over 100% if you have overspent, although the bar stops visually at 100%). The colour of the bar and the status label follow a traffic light:

• Green — "OK": you are below your alert threshold. All good.
• Amber — "Near the limit": you have reached or passed the alert threshold (80% by default) but not yet 100%. It is the "watch out, it's running out" warning.
• Red — "Limit exceeded": you have reached 100% or more. You have gone over the cap.

Next to the bar you see three figures: Spent (what you have used), Budget (the cap) and Remaining (what is left). The remaining amount appears in green while you still have room and in red with a minus sign when you have gone over (telling you how much you overspent).

Carrying what’s left (or overspent) to next month

Each budget decides what happens when the month changes, under “What's left over or overspent each month”. There are three options, and the first is the default:

• Don't carry over: each month you get the budget amount, whatever happened the month before.
• Carry over what's left: whatever you don't spend is added to next month. If you overspend, next month starts from zero: the excess is not deducted.
• Carry over what's left and what's overspent: on top of that, if you overspend, the excess is deducted from next month. If you had €200 in June and spent €230, you have €170 in July.

With carry-over you can set a cap on what builds up: what's left over adds up to that amount at most, so a budget you never use doesn't grow forever. Overspending has no cap. Carry-over counts from the month you turn it on: it doesn't bring in what was left in earlier months. If you turn it off and on again, it starts afresh.

In the list, the month's available amount already includes the carry-over, and below it you'll see how much comes from last month (green if it adds, red if it takes away). The bar and the traffic light are worked out on the available amount.

Other periods: weekly, fortnightly, two-monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly

Not everything is spent monthly. When you create a budget you can choose its period: weekly, fortnightly, monthly, every two months, quarterly, every six months or yearly. For holidays, say, enter €1,200 a year instead of €100 a month that you “overspend” in August. The amount is always the one for the period.

With “Starts counting on” you decide when each period begins:

• Weekly: the day of the week it starts on (Monday by default).
• Fortnightly: a day on which a fortnight starts. Left empty, fortnights are fixed and start on a Monday.
• Every two months, quarterly, every six months and yearly: the month the cycle starts in (January by default). A yearly budget starting in September runs from September to August, like a school year.

Monthly is always the calendar month. These budgets compare what you've spent in the current period with its amount and, instead of the streak, show the period's dates and the pace: “you've used 70% of the budget and 60% of the period has gone by”. If you're well ahead, the pace shows in amber. They don't carry over (that's only for monthly budgets) and, when you click them, they open the period's transactions.

In the forecast, weekly and fortnightly budgets forecast what's left at the end of each period. For longer periods you choose under “How what's left is forecast”: split into periods (spread automatically at the end of each month) or as a single payment at the end of the month you pick. For example, summer holidays: yearly, a single payment at the end of August. If that month has already passed in the current period, nothing is forecast for that period.

Counting what is left of the budget in the forecast

Sporadic spending (restaurants, leisure, gifts…) isn't regular enough to be a recurring item, but you do spend it. Without it, the forecast would assume you spend nothing on it. That's why, with “Include in the forecast” on (it is by default), whatever you have left to spend of each budget goes into the forecast as an expected expense:

• Monthly: on the last day of each month, for the budget amount (plus that month's envelope adjustments) minus what you have already spent and the recurring items in that category. In the current month it goes down as you spend; if you overspend, it disappears.
• Yearly: what's left of the year is spread over the end of each remaining month.

Surplus carried over from previous months isn't forecast. The expected expense goes into the account where you spend most in that category, or the one you choose in the budget. In Transactions it shows up as “Budget left: category”, but it can't be confirmed or edited: it adjusts itself with your spending, and at the end of the month whatever wasn't spent disappears.

Budgets by tag, exclusions and order in the forecast

Besides by category, a budget can be by tag: it counts everything with that tag, whatever its category. It's for spending that crosses categories, like a trip, a wedding or a renovation. When you create it, choose “By tag” and the tag.

A category budget can exclude transactions with certain tags: if you exclude “Holidays” from “Restaurants”, meals on the trip don't count in your monthly restaurant budget.

In tracking, each budget sees everything that belongs to it: a dinner in Rome counts in “Trip to Rome” and in “Restaurants”, unless you excluded it. In the forecast, however, each expense counts in a single budget, so it isn't deducted twice: the first one that matches it according to the “Order in the forecast”. That button appears next to “New budget” when you have at least two. By default, tag budgets come first (they're more specific), then category budgets.

Group methods: 50/30/20 and Kakebo

At the top of the page there are three tabs: By category (the usual budgets), 50/30/20 and Kakebo. The last two don't ask for an amount per category: they group your month's spending and compare it with what came in. They use the month in the selector and only count real transactions, with the same criteria as the reports (transfers aren't spending).

Default categories come already classified (groceries are a need, restaurants a want…), so it works from day one. With Classify categories you change whatever doesn't fit and classify the ones you created; you can also leave a default category unclassified on purpose. Anything not in a group shows separately as “unclassified”, so nothing gets lost.

• 50/30/20: of what you earn, 50% for needs (housing, food, bills, transport), 30% for wants (eating out, leisure, travel) and 20% for savings or paying off debt. Each group has its bar with a mark at the target, and below it how many points you're off. Savings are what's left of your income plus what goes to savings categories (a contribution to investments isn't consumption). The percentages can be changed (60/20/20, for example), as long as they add up to 100.
• Kakebo, the Japanese notebook method: spending in four groups (survival, leisure and vice, culture and extras) and the month's four questions: how much you have (your income), how much you'd like to save (you enter it at the start), how much you're spending (worked out for you, with what you've saved against your goal) and how you can improve (you write it when you close the month). It's saved month by month.

If one month you spend more than twice what came in, the percentages stop meaning anything: you're told so and the target isn't judged.

Envelopes: give every euro a job

In the By category tab, above the list, you'll see how much is left to assign this month: what came in minus what you've spread across monthly budgets. It's the envelope method: the idea is that every euro that comes in has a job, until nothing is left to assign. If you've assigned more than came in, the notice turns red.

With Move money you shift an amount from one budget to another (if “Restaurants” fell short, take it from “Leisure”), assign what's left to a budget, or return what's left over from one to “left to assign”. Moving money only changes what's available that month; the budget amount stays the same for the following ones. If the budget carries over, what's left of that month (including what you moved) passes to the next. Each budget shows what's been moved to it this month. Yearly budgets aren't part of the monthly split.

Streaks: months in a row within budget

Once a budget has some history, below its name you'll see how you're doing with it: “3 months in a row within budget” counts the consecutive closed months in which you didn't overspend (it is highlighted at 3, 6 and 12 months), and “10 of the last 12 months within budget” sums up the last year.

They go together on purpose: a streak breaks with one bad month, but the second figure isn't lost over one slip, so a month that goes wrong doesn't wipe out everything you've done. Only closed months count, and only since the budget exists; if it has carry-over, “within” means within that month's available amount (budget plus what was carried).

Personal / freelance scope (freelance module)

If you have the freelance module active, each budget carries a scope that decides which spending counts against the cap:

• Personal: only adds up personal expenses in the category.
• Freelance: only adds up expenses from your self-employed activity.
• Both: adds up both personal and freelance together.

This lets you, for example, set a €200 cap on Work materials just for the freelance side, without mixing it with personal spending. In the list, budgets with a scope other than "Personal" show a label pointing it out. If you don't use the freelance module, you won't see this field and all your budgets are, quite simply, personal.

The budget list

On wide screens budgets are shown in a table with columns: category (with its icon and colour), progress (bar + percentage), spent, budget, remaining, status and —if you have freelance— scope. On narrow screens (or side panels) it automatically switches to stacked cards, with the same information laid out vertically.

When you click a row or card, Cuéntamo takes you to the transactions list already filtered by that category and month (real transactions only), so you can see at a glance which specific expenses consumed the budget. It is the quick way to answer "where did it go?".

Pause, edit and delete

To the right of each budget (or at the foot of each card) you have three actions:

• Pause / Activate. The pause/play icon disables or re-enables the budget without deleting it. A paused budget is no longer tracked (and frees up its category so you can budget it differently).
• Edit. Opens the same form to change the amount, the threshold, the scope or the status. The category of an existing budget can be reassigned among the ones that are free.
• Delete. Removes the budget (it asks for confirmation). Only the cap is deleted; your transactions are untouched: the spending stays recorded, you simply stop tracking it with a budget.

Something to keep in mind: the list shows active budgets. When you pause one, it stops appearing in the list. To track that category again, create a budget for it once more (the category is free as soon as the previous one is paused).

Budgets, goals and analysis

The budget is the tool for short-term spending limits (month by month, per category). It pairs with two others:

• Savings goals look at the other side: how much you want to accumulate for a target and at what pace, rather than how much you want to spend.
• The monthly table in Analysis gives you the historical picture of how much you have spent per category month by month; it is useful for setting a realistic cap before creating the budget.

A good starting point: check in Analysis what you usually spend in a category, set a cap a little below that, and let the traffic light warn you during the month.