Reading the Charts
The dashboard has a set of charts. You pick one at a time from the row of chips — Net Worth, Cash Flow, Split, Savings Rate, Income vs Spending, By Category and Change — or tap All charts for the full list with a line about each.
Above the chips is the period control: Month, Paycheck or Year. Every chart follows it.
Each chart has an ⓘ beside its title that explains it in the app. Here's what each one is actually for.
Net Worth
Your total savings and your total debt, as two lines over time.
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. The plan is working when the lines pull apart the right way — savings climbing, debt falling. Where they cross is the point you have more saved than you owe.
At Month and Year, each point is the average of the paychecks in that period. If your budget has an emergency fund target, it's drawn as a flat dashed Target line, so you can see the savings line approach it.
It also moves slowly, which is the point. Check it monthly, not daily.
Cash Flow
Where one period's income went, as a waterfall: Income as the first bar, then Housing, Expenses and Debts each stepping down from it, and what's left as Surplus.
The title names the period: Cash Flow This Month, Cash Flow This Year, or Cash Flow Last Paycheck on the Paycheck setting.
This is where the paycheck model pays off. A year that balances on paper can hide a period where everything landed at once. The surplus is what went to savings; if it's gone, that period spent everything it earned.
Spending Split
A ring showing what share of one period's income went to Expenses, Housing, Savings and Debt. Tap a slice to highlight it, and use the arrows to step to the previous or next period.
Best used for the sanity check on the big three: housing, debt, everything else. If housing is dominating the ring, 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
Savings as a percentage of income, period by period.
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.
On a payoff plan the rate is low by design. It rises as debts clear and their payments roll into savings.
Income vs Spending
Two lines: Income, and Spending (housing, expenses and debt payments together). The gap between them is what you kept.
The plainest chart on the dashboard and often the most immediately useful: are the lines converging, diverging, or crossing? Lines that touch mean a period with nothing left over. If spending is tracking income upward, that's lifestyle creep with a graph attached.
By Category
Three lines — Housing, Expenses and Debts — so you can see which one is moving.
The useful pattern is a line 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. The Debts line should fall as debts clear.
Spending Change
Bars showing how much total spending rose or fell against the period before, as a percentage. Up is red, because more spending is the thing to notice; down is green.
The early-warning chart. Absolute numbers hide gradual movement; a percentage makes spending that's crept up 8% three periods running impossible to miss. A single big swing is usually a quarterly or yearly bill landing, not a habit changing — check the period before judging it.
Getting the most out of them
Change the period, not just the chart. The same chart at Paycheck and at Year tells you completely different things — one shows an event, the other shows a pattern. Most questions worth asking are pattern questions.
Use the period control deliberately. Month smooths over exactly the timing problems the app exists to solve. When you're investigating why a stretch felt tight, switch to Paycheck.
They show the whole plan. The charts cover every paycheck in the plan you're tracking on Home, including the ones still ahead, so they show where the plan is headed as well as where it's been. Changes you make on Home — a new bill amount, a different paycheck, an added expense — are recalculated into them. Spending you log under a bill line doesn't change that bill's line; if it runs over, the savings lines show it instead.
"Not enough data yet" means the chart has nothing to draw for that period. Spending Change needs at least two periods, so it's often empty at Year on a short plan.
Locked charts
On the Free plan, Net Worth by Month is open. The other charts show a lock on their chip, and opening one blurs it behind Upgrade Your Plan. Paycheck and Year show a lock too, and tapping them opens the upgrade screen.
The deeper analytics are a Thrive feature. See What's Included with Thrive.