Reading the Charts
The dashboard has seven charts. You pick one at a time from the chart selector — if nothing's chosen you'll see a Select a chart prompt.
Each one answers a different question. Here they are, and what each is actually for.
Net Worth Tracker
Your overall position over time: what you have minus what you owe.
This is the chart to care about. Every other view here shows a piece of the picture; this one shows whether the whole thing is moving. As debts shrink and savings grow, the line climbs — and because it's driven by both sides at once, it keeps rising even in periods where savings are flat because you're paying down aggressively.
It also moves slowly, which is the point. Check it monthly, not daily.
Spending Category Trends
How your categories move over time. Not what you spent this period — whether a category is drifting.
The useful pattern is a category that climbs quietly across several periods. That's the kind of thing you don't notice paycheck to paycheck and that quietly eats a plan.
Your Financial Pie
Where your money goes, proportionally, in the selected period.
Best used for the sanity check on the big three: housing, debt, everything else. If housing is dominating the pie, that's a structural fact about your budget that no category discipline elsewhere will offset — and it's an argument for the Rent Affordability calculator next time you move.
Savings Rate
The share of income you're actually keeping.
More useful than the dollar amount, because it's comparable across periods with different income. A raise that doesn't move your savings rate means the raise was absorbed rather than kept — a thing that's very hard to notice any other way.
Income vs Spending
The two totals against each other over time.
The plainest chart on the dashboard and often the most immediately useful: are the lines converging, diverging, or crossing? If spending is tracking income upward, that's lifestyle creep with a graph attached.
Cash Flow
Money in versus money out across the period, showing the timing rather than just the totals.
This is where the paycheck model pays off. A month that balances on paper can contain a period where everything landed at once, and cash flow is where that shows up. Pair it with the Paycheck toggle for the sharpest view.
Spending Change %
Period-over-period change as a percentage.
The early-warning chart. Absolute numbers hide gradual movement; a percentage makes a category that's crept up 8% three periods running impossible to miss.
Getting the most out of them
Change the time range, not just the chart. The same chart at Last Paycheck and at This Year tells you completely different things — one shows an event, the other shows a pattern. Most questions worth asking are pattern questions.
Use the Paycheck/Month toggle deliberately. Month smooths over exactly the timing problems the app exists to solve. When you're investigating why a period felt tight, switch to Paycheck.
They're built on completed bills. Everything here reflects what you've marked off in Track. Sparse charts on a new budget are normal; sparse charts on an old one usually mean the marking has slipped.
Locked charts
Some views prompt Upgrade Your Plan — the deeper analytics are a Thrive feature. See What's Included with Thrive.