Your Active Budget

One budget at a time is active. It's the one the rest of the app runs on.

What it controls

The active budget determines:

• ›Your paycheck schedule — the pay periods on the home screen
• ›Your bills — what appears in each period's Upcoming list
• ›Your dashboard — every number and chart in Analyze
• ›Your canvases — each canvas belongs to a paycheck, which belongs to this budget

Change the active budget and all of that changes with it. It's the single setting with the widest reach in the app.

In the Archive, the active budget is labelled Active Budget.

If nothing is active

You'll see No budget selected on the home screen, and the dashboard will have nothing to draw.

This happens when you've built budgets but haven't made one active, or after deleting the budget that was. Open the Archive and restore one.

If you've never built a budget, that's a different situation — start with Creating Your First Budget.

Restoring a different budget

Any budget in the Archive can be made active with Restore.

Reasons you'd do this:

A plan is too aggressive. You picked Maximum Effort, discovered it doesn't survive an ordinary month, and want to go back to something sustainable. This is a good decision, not a retreat — see Understanding Your Results.

You were exploring. You built a scenario budget to see what a move or a purchase would do, switched to it to look around, and now want your real plan back.

Circumstances reverted. A temporary income change ended and the old plan fits again.

Automated restoration of past budgets is a Thrive feature. See What's Included with Thrive.

What happens to your tracking

Completed bills stay completed. Switching the active budget doesn't erase what you've already marked off.

But the paycheck schedule comes from the budget, so a budget built with a different next payday or pay frequency will lay out its periods differently. Your history remains; the shape of the periods ahead may not match what you were looking at.

Expect the dashboard to look different immediately after switching. It's reporting on a different plan.

Restore or rebuild?

Restore when a past budget still describes your situation accurately. Nothing has really changed; you just want a different plan.

Rebuild when your circumstances have moved — new income, a cleared debt, a move. An old budget restored onto a changed situation will project from figures that are no longer true.

If in doubt, look at the restored budget's Input Details in the Archive. If the income and debts listed there aren't your current ones, rebuild instead. See Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.

One at a time

However many budgets you have saved, only one drives the app. The others are reference and comparison material until you restore them.