The Guided Walkthrough

The walkthrough is the app's built-in tutorial. Instead of dropping you into an empty Budget Builder, it takes you through the same sections one screen at a time, explaining what each field is for as you fill it in.

You can start it from Tutorial on the home screen. It's worth running once even if you're comfortable with budgeting apps, because it's also where the paycheck model is easiest to see.

The four steps

The walkthrough follows the same order as the Builder itself.

1. Income

You'll enter what you earn, how often you're paid, and when your next payday falls. This last one matters more than it looks — the entire plan is laid out on your pay schedule, so the next payday is the anchor date for everything that follows.

You'll also enter your Current Savings here. That's your starting balance, not a goal.

2. Housing

Rent or mortgage, entered on its own screen. Housing gets its own step because it's usually the largest single line in a budget and because a mortgage behaves differently from rent when the algorithm looks at payoff options.

3. Expenses

Your other recurring costs — utilities, insurance, subscriptions, groceries, transportation. Each one has an amount and a frequency, and can carry a due date so it lands on the right paycheck.

4. Debts

Every balance you're paying down, with its interest rate and minimum payment. This is the step that does the most work in the final plan.

Reviewing and building

The walkthrough ends on Review Your Budget, where you can look over everything you entered before the app calculates. Anything wrong here is easier to fix now than after you've built.

From there the app runs the same calculation the Builder does and hands you your plans. See Understanding Your Results for how to read them.

The calculator walkthrough

There's a second, shorter walkthrough for the calculators, reachable from Explore Calculators. It covers a different starting point: rather than building a budget from what you already have, you use a calculator to price out something you're considering — a car, a house, a refinance — and then send that result into the Budget Builder to see what it does to your plan.

That handoff is the part worth knowing about. Several calculators have an Add To Budget button that pushes the result straight into your Builder inputs. See Calculators Overview.

Skipping it

The walkthrough isn't mandatory, and nothing you enter through it is treated differently from what you'd enter directly in the Builder. If you'd rather work in the full Builder screen, go straight to Creating Your First Budget.