Three steps and you have one: who earns, what goes off every month, and where the rest goes. The bills come as a tick-list with the amounts already filled in, so you correct rather than invent. After that you are only recording what you spent.
Open BudgetPal What it doesAn example. Every figure is invented.
A budget app that opens empty is a budget app that gets set up once, badly, at night. So it asks three things and then it is working.
The amounts come filled in, deliberately round and deliberately wrong. A figure you have to correct is a far smaller job than a figure you have to think of.
School fees and the school bus are set up for the months they are actually payable rather than smeared across twelve. That is the sort of thing that makes a budget wrong in January.
Share a payment notification into the app and it reads the amount, the shop and the card, then offers to file it against a jar. It guesses from what it has learnt about where you shop, and it never files anything by itself.
They wait in a queue until somebody looks at them. Nothing touches the budget until you say so.
Open your banking app, type in what it says, and BudgetPal compares the movement since the last time you did. The gap it reports is the one number a budget can produce that catches what was never entered at all.
Nothing is corrected. A gap is information.
Both of you see the same jars, the same bills and every payment either of you records. It is sealed on the phone before it leaves, with a key only your phones hold, so the server it passes through holds ciphertext and a version number and can read none of it.
Nothing leaves the phone until you turn sharing on. Write the key down when it is given to you: it cannot be recovered, which is the same sentence as nobody else being able to reach your budget.
Euro, pound, dollar, rupee, naira, cedi, shilling, rand and forty more — each written the way its own banks write it: where the thousands break, which mark is the decimal point, which side the symbol goes. A yen has no decimals at all.
Switching changes how the numbers are written and converts nothing. The app has no exchange rate and is not going to invent one.
No account, no sign-up, no advertising, nothing to pay. Your budget is stored by the browser on your own phone and works with no signal.
The one exception, stated because a privacy claim that is almost true is worse than none: once a day the app records that it was opened, so we know whether anyone uses it. Once a day rather than once an open, and nothing about your money.
Open it, then use your browser’s menu — Install app on Android, or Add to Home Screen from the share button on an iPhone. It then opens like any other app, with its own icon, and works offline.
BudgetPal is one of a family of small apps — see the rest. Get these apps on your phone — the checklist gives the exact two steps for the browser you are holding, and remembers where you got to.