What is left after every bill, every reserve and your float have been taken out, divided by the days until payday.
It is deliberately conservative. It assumes you spend the same amount every day, which you will not, so underspending
today makes tomorrow's number go up on its own. Nothing you have already committed to is in here, so if you
stay under it, the bills clear. Tap any line in Between now and payday to see where it comes from.
Moves today
bill landsin the clearbelow zero
Between now and payday
Quick log
Ask Claude
Log a spend
Only matters for something dated the same day you last set the balance. Tick it if the bank had already taken this money when you read that figure. Leave it alone if you spent it afterwards.
Every spend comes straight off today's number. Underspend and tomorrow goes up on its own. Tag food and groceries and the month's food total tracks itself.
The date matters. Leave it blank for today. Set it to a day on or before your balance date and the app treats it as already inside the bank figure, so it records the spend without taking the money twice.
This month, against the plan
Food this month
The weekly trip
The 4th, 14th and 23rd. Gaps of 10, 9 and 12 days, so nothing runs out between trips, and none of the three lands on a bill day. Pushing moves this month only; the pattern resets next month. Going early needs no button: log the trip and it counts against the next planned day on its own.
Standing orders
Counts run themselves down each day. Press "Ordered" when it ships and it adds a case and logs the spend.
E-ZPass
Set it to a low number after a top-up and the app counts the crossings down for you.
Fuel
Where the needle was before you filled · leave blank if you did not fill to full
Amount is all that is needed. For the odometer, type whatever the dashboard says and the app does the subtraction. Two fills before the first figure appears.
Filling to full is the standing rule, so set the gauge every time. If you ever have to put in a partial fill, leave the gauge blank and that one is quietly left out of the range and tank figures.
Recurring
Half of $106.00 including Maryland tax. Logs at 50% business use, which is the standing rule.
Log the weekly shop
Until it is logged, the app holds this money back so the daily number cannot spend it. Leave the date blank for today, or set it to the day you actually shopped.
Split a receipt
The in-law half
Recent
Next payday
Getting off the advances
Log an advance
An advance is not income. It is the same paycheck arriving early, so it adds to your balance and shrinks the deposit it borrows from. Date it the day it LANDED in checking. One dated on or before your balance anchor is already inside the balance you typed, so it only trims the deposit it borrows from and does not add again.
Fill in this order
Add to a layer
Contributions fill the next unfilled layer first. Nothing reaches the emergency fund until the float is full and the tax catch-up is closed.
The plan
Check against Ally
Open Ally, read the tax reserve bucket, type it here. This page records what a split should have sent. Only your bank knows what actually arrived. Nothing reconciled the two until now, and a single missed Friday in August left $90 of tax money sitting in checking for five weeks.
Contributions
How a cleared payment splits
Money owed to you
Add work
X payout landed
One tap for the biweekly payout: creates the X job already cleared today and runs the split, identical to walking it through by hand. Change the amount first if the payout differs.
Earned means done but not yet invoiced. Nothing reaches the ledger until it clears. Pollo AI is $200 a post at 5,000+ views, $120 below.
Estimated tax
The next eight weeks
Milestones
This week
The list
Tick things off as they go in the trolley. The list survives closing the app, so start it on Tuesday when you notice you are out of something and it is still there on Saturday.
Recipes
Add a recipe
Ingredients go on the shopping list with one tap, so write them the way you would buy them rather than the way you would measure them.
The shops
Log a shop
This logs a grocery spend, the same as the Spending page does, so the money is only counted once. The store name is kept so a price difference between shops is traceable.
Price watch
Unit price, not the shelf price. A $9.99 pack of chicken means nothing without the weight, and Harris Teeter prints the per-pound figure on the receipt. Twelve numbers a shop is the whole job.
Add an item to watch
What you are saving for
Put money in
Freelance money only. The 30% you keep after the IRS and tax splits is the part that is genuinely yours, and this is what it is for.
Add a goal
A date is optional. Give one and the app works out what it needs a month, and tells you if that is more than you have.
Contributions
Prior-year balance
Log a payment
This is the prior-year debt, separate from the current-year tax reserve. It grows at roughly 8% a year plus penalty, so paying it beats banking against it.
Payoff projection
Payments
The month, day by day
Edit bills
Name, amount, day of the month. Both checks are written on the 1st, so they sit on day 1 regardless of when they clear. Fill the last column with a date to make a bill one-off: it fires once and then stops, instead of coming back every month.
Update from the workbook
Drop the Freelance Bookkeeping .xlsx hereor tap to choose a file
Reads the Dashboard, IRS Payoff, Tax Reserve and Reserve Plan tabs for your targets and balances, and a Ledger Import tab for transactions if there is one. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. The file is parsed on this device and only the numbers are kept.
Rows waiting to come in
Daily routine
1 · Export the checking CSVdaily
2 · Update the balance in Setupdaily
3 · Log trips and advancesdaily
4 · Import the workbook hereweekly
5 · Reconcile against the real balance1st Saturday
Chores calendar reminds you at 8:30pm. The point is not the bookkeeping, it is seeing the 1st and the 25th coming while you can still act.
This device and the cloud
What is on each side
Backup
Sync protects you against losing a device. It does not protect you against deleting something and that deletion reaching the other device three seconds later. Take a file now and then.
Export for the workbook
One row per thing logged: spends, fuel, advances, reserve deposits, IRS payments, goals and their contributions, work, and a summary of where you stand. Hand the file over and the workbook can be brought up to date from it without you having to explain anything.
Money
Reconcile with the bank
Open the bank, read the CURRENT balance, type it here. The app shows its own working, and if the two disagree it hunts for the one record that explains the gap, because every discrepancy this month was a single record: a $90 trip, a missing $150 advance, a ten-cent typo.
Type the bank\u2019s CURRENT balance, never available. Pending charges stay out of the anchor and get logged as spends instead.
Step the float up as it builds: $200 September, $400 October, $600 November. $600 covers the worst check month so far, April at $575.61.
Move money between accounts
Three destinations exist because a split does not only go to savings. IRS, Direct Pay: the money leaves checking and the IRS share of the earmark clears, and the payment itself is already on the IRS page from the clear, so do not log it there again. Paid to a person: leaves checking, clears that slice, no reserve involved. Kept in checking as the float: nothing leaves, the goals slice clears, and the float target rises by the amount in one move. Added 1 September, the first morning the full split ran.
Use this instead of retyping the balance. A transfer is not spending, so the daily number is not punished for it, but checking and the overdraft buffer both move. This is the thing the app cannot see on its own.
Money coming in
Payroll only. Leave advances out, or the app will tell you that you can afford money you have already spent.
Claude
Two secrets live on the server, not here. In the Cloudflare Pages project, Settings, Environment variables, add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and AI_PASSPHRASE, both Encrypted, then redeploy. Type the same words as AI_PASSPHRASE in the box above. The passphrase stays in this browser and is the one thing in Ledger that does not sync, because a credential does not belong in the same blob as the numbers it guards. Set it again on each device.
The endpoint is already behind your Cloudflare Access sign-in, so nobody outside can reach it. The passphrase is the second lock: it is what stops a session left open on a borrowed laptop from spending the key. Ceiling is 60 requests an hour, and the server keeps a count of calls and tokens and nothing else. No prompt, no answer, no receipt.
Danger
Clears every spend, trip, advance, contribution, bill and setting on this device.