The Home Screen
The home screen is where you'll spend nearly all of your time in BetterBudgets. It has two tabs — Track and Analyze — and Track is the default.
This page covers Track. For Analyze, see Dashboard Overview.
What's on the Track tab
The paycheck date. The pay period you're currently looking at. The app opens on the current one.
Paycheck Amount. What this paycheck is worth. On Thrive you can tap to edit it when the real deposit differs from the plan — see Completing Bills.
Bills For [date]. The bills due out of this paycheck, split into Upcoming and Completed. This is the working part of the screen.
Totals To Date and Monthly Bills. Two summary views over your progress. See Totals to Date & Monthly Bills.
Canvas. Opens the freehand worksheet attached to this paycheck, pre-loaded with its bills. See What is Canvas?
Paychecks. Navigation between pay periods. See Moving Between Paychecks.
Tutorial. Launches the guided walkthrough.
The bill list
Each bill shows its name and amount, and carries a category — Housing, Debt, or Expense — inherited from the section of the Builder it came from.
Bills move between two lists as you work:
- ›Upcoming — due out of this paycheck, not yet paid
- ›Completed — paid and marked off
Bills without a name show as Unnamed, and bills without a date show as No Due Date. Both are worth fixing in the Builder, since a bill with no due date can't be reliably placed on the right paycheck.
Before you have a budget
With no active budget the screen prompts you to get started rather than showing an empty tracker — there are no paychecks to display until a budget defines them.
If you're browsing without an account you'll appear as Guest. You can look around, but saving a budget requires an account. See Setting Up Your Account.
If you have budgets but the screen says none is selected, you need to make one active from the Archive.
The routine
The screen is built around a specific, short habit:
Open it on payday. Work down Upcoming. Mark things complete as you pay them.
That's the entire ongoing commitment. Everything else in the app — the dashboard, the charts, the projections — is downstream of doing this consistently. The numbers in Analyze are only as good as the marking-off in Track.