Organizing & Deleting

Budgets accumulate faster than you'd expect. The Archive has a few tools for keeping the list navigable.

Search

Search filters the list by name and description — which is the practical reason to write real names and notes. A search for Denver finds the budgets you built while considering the move; a list of New Budget entries finds nothing.

See Naming Your Budget.

Sort

Four options:

• ›Newest — most recent first, the default view most of the time
• ›Oldest — earliest first, good for seeing where you started
• ›A to Z — alphabetical
• ›Z to A — reverse alphabetical

Alphabetical sorting becomes genuinely useful if you name budgets with a consistent prefix. Naming scenario budgets Scenario — Denver, Scenario — new car groups them together automatically.

Pin to Top

Pinning keeps a budget at the head of the list regardless of sort order. Unpin removes it.

Worth pinning:

• ›Your active budget, for quick access
• ›A baseline you compare everything against
• ›Whatever you're currently deciding between

Pinning everything defeats the purpose. Two or three is about right.

Delete

Delete Budget removes a budget permanently. You'll get a confirmation dialog with Cancel and Delete.

This is irreversible. A deleted budget and its inputs are gone — there's no undo and no recovery.

Think before deleting

Budgets are small and the Archive holds as many as you like. There's very little reason to delete, and a few good reasons not to.

An old budget is a record of what your finances looked like at a point in time — your income, your balances, your rates. That becomes more valuable as it ages, not less. The budget from two years ago showing $31,000 in debt is worth keeping when today's shows $8,000.

Better options than deleting:

• ›Leave it. Sorting and searching handle a long list fine.
• ›Rename it to something clearly historical — Old — pre-2024 — so it stops competing for attention.
• ›Unpin it if it's cluttering the top.

Reasonable reasons to actually delete: genuine duplicates, a budget created by mistake, or a test you built while learning the app.

Deleting the active budget

If you delete the budget that's currently active, you'll be left with none selected, and the home screen and dashboard will have nothing to show until you restore another.

Make a different budget active first, then delete. See Your Active Budget.

Keeping it manageable

A few habits that keep the Archive useful rather than overwhelming:

• ›Rebuild only when your circumstances actually change, not after every bad month — see Editing & Rebuilding a Budget
• ›Name scenario budgets with a common prefix so they group
• ›Pin sparingly
• ›Use the notes field, so an old budget can explain itself