Completing Bills
Ticking off bills is the one thing BetterBudgets asks you to do regularly. It takes a couple of minutes per paycheck.
Ticking a bill
Tap a bill row to tick it paid. The row turns green, and the paycheck amount at the top drops by that bill straight away — it shows what's left of this paycheck. Tap again to untick it.
Every bill starts unticked. What's still unticked is what's still coming out of this check.
Debt payments work the same way. Ticking them is how you record that your payoff is actually happening.
The workflow
- ›You get paid.
- ›Open the app — it's on the current paycheck.
- ›Pay your bills as you normally would, through your bank or biller.
- ›Tick each one in BetterBudgets as you go.
BetterBudgets doesn't move money. It has no connection to your bank and doesn't pay anything on your behalf. Ticking a bill records that you paid it.
Which paychecks you can change
Ticking, editing and adding are open on three paychecks: the previous, the current and the next. Older paychecks are history; later ones haven't happened yet. Try anywhere else and you'll see You can only edit items for the previous, current, and next paycheck.
Every change applies to that one paycheck only. There's no "apply to all" — if a bill is consistently different from the plan, fix it in the Builder and rebuild. See Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.
Do it as you pay, not afterward
Ticking bills as you actually pay them takes seconds. Reconstructing a pay period two weeks later takes real effort and you'll get some of it wrong.
The failure mode isn't dramatic — you just fall a period behind, then two, and eventually the app is showing you a version of your finances you no longer trust. If that happens, don't try to rebuild the history. Tick the current paycheck accurately and carry on from there.
Bills you didn't pay
If a bill didn't get paid, leave it unticked. Don't tick it to tidy the screen — the whole value of the list is that it reflects reality.
A bill that repeatedly goes unpaid is a signal that the plan is too tight for the period it's in, which usually means either the due date is wrong or you're on a more aggressive plan than your situation supports. Both are worth addressing rather than working around.
Editing a bill (Thrive)
Planned amounts and real amounts drift. A utility bill comes in higher than usual; a variable expense lands lower.
Swipe a row left to edit it. On Free this opens the upgrade screen instead — editing is a Thrive feature. See What's Included with Thrive.
- ›A bill or housing line — change its amount for this paycheck.
- ›A debt — change the New payment, and optionally the Balance after last paycheck.
The form tells you what the change means as you type — for example, how much more comes out of savings, or how much it frees.
Correcting a debt balance
Balance after last paycheck is what you owed once the previous paycheck and its bills cleared — the figure on your latest statement, say. The app writes it on the previous paycheck, then carries it through this one: interest if a new billing cycle starts, then this payment. Every later paycheck's balance follows from it.
A payment can't be more than the debt owes going into the paycheck. Try it and you'll see something like Visa has $240.00 left. Pay up to $240.00.
Editing the paycheck amount (Thrive)
Tap the paycheck amount at the top to correct it: overtime, a short week, a bonus, an unpaid day. When a paycheck combines more than one income source, the form has a field for each, so you change only the job that was different.
The bills on the paycheck stay as they were. What changes is what this paycheck puts into savings, and the running totals from here on.
Putting freed money toward debt
When you lower a bill or raise the paycheck, the app asks whether to put the difference toward debt: Pay down debt or Keep as savings.
Pay down debt sends the freed money to the debts on this paycheck, highest interest rate first. It skips debts you've already ticked, never pays a debt past its balance, and never sends more than the edit actually freed. Anything left over stays in savings. The debt row then reads like $100 + $50 extra.
Lowering a debt payment doesn't offer this — that money stays in savings. And a budget with no debts never asks.
Typing a new payment on a debt replaces any extra sent to it earlier.
How savings limits an edit
An edit that costs more — a higher bill, a smaller paycheck, an added expense — comes out of savings. It can borrow from your running savings, not just this paycheck's, as long as your running total from this paycheck to the end of the plan never drops below zero.
The form tells you the limit: Savings can cover up to $X from this paycheck on. If your plan already runs short later on, you can still make changes that don't make that low point any worse.
After you save, the app tells you if your debt-free date moved, and flags any debt the plan no longer pays off by its last paycheck — rebuild the budget to extend it.
Adding an expense (Thrive)
Tap Add (the plus under the paycheck strip) to add to the paycheck you're on. Give it a name, an amount and a date inside this pay period.
The optional Under field decides what kind of expense it is.
Its own line
Leave Under on Nothing, its own line and the expense becomes a new one-off line on this paycheck, coming out of savings. Its name has to be different from everything else on the paycheck.
Spending under a line
Pick one of the paycheck's housing or expense lines — groceries under Living, say — and the expense is logged against that line instead:
- ›The row reads $125 of $600: spent of planned.
- ›Spending past the plan comes out of savings.
- ›Tick the line when you're done with it. It settles at what you actually spent, and whatever was left goes back to savings.
- ›Untick it to reopen it at the plan.
Debts can't take spending under them.
Details and removing things
Swipe a row right for its details: amount, due date and frequency, or for a debt its balance, interest rate, payment and any extra.
For a line you added, or a line with spending logged under it, the details also list each expense with a button to remove it. A line you added has a Remove button too; its expenses go with it, and its amount goes back into savings.
Lines that came with your plan can't be removed. Set the amount to zero instead, and use Hide to keep zero lines out of view.