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.
Every section on Track has a small info button beside its heading that explains it in the app.
What's on the Track tab
From top to bottom:
Paychecks. A strip of cards, one per paycheck in your plan, in order. The app opens on the current one — the first paycheck dated today or later. See Moving Between Paychecks.
The control row. Under the strip: Canvas, Add (the plus), a switch for the progress rings, Hide, and an info button about editing the paycheck.
Bills For [date]. The paycheck you're on: the arrows, the paycheck amount, and every bill due out of it. This is the working part of the screen. See Completing Bills.
Savings and Totals To Date. What this paycheck puts into savings, and where the plan has you after it. See Totals to Date & Coming Up.
Coming Up. What's due on the paychecks after this one.
The paycheck cards
Each card shows the income source (or sources) paid on that date, the date itself, and the paycheck's amount. On Thrive it reads as money in and money out — the paycheck and the total of its bills. Underneath is how much of the paycheck's bills you've ticked off, as a percentage.
Tap a card to make it the paycheck everything below shows.
The control row
Canvas. Opens a freehand worksheet attached to this paycheck. Canvas is a Thrive feature. See What is Canvas?
Add. Adds an expense to this paycheck — a one-off line of its own, or spending logged under one of its lines. A Thrive feature. See Completing Bills.
Progress rings. Shows or hides the small ring on each bill row.
Hide. Drops any line budgeted at zero on this paycheck, so short checks read cleanly. Tap again to show them.
A small cloud icon appears beside these while a change is saving, and briefly after it's saved.
The paycheck amount
Between the two arrows is the paycheck amount — what's left of this paycheck after the bills you've ticked. It goes down as soon as you tick a bill and back up if you untick one. If you've edited the paycheck, the figure shows in red.
On Thrive, tap it to correct the paycheck when the real deposit differed from the plan. On Free it says Upgrade to edit.
The bill rows
Each row shows the bill's name, its amount and its due date. Debts, other expenses and housing are all in the one list.
The row's colour tells you where it stands:
- ›Green — ticked off
- ›Red — past its due date and not ticked
- ›Orange — due within three days
- ›Yellow — due later
The ring beside the amount matters for a bill the plan spreads over more than one paycheck: it shows how much of that bill you've ticked off across all of them.
An amount shown in dark red has been edited on this paycheck. A debt that got an extra payment reads like $100 + $50 extra, and a line with spending logged under it reads like $125 of $600 — spent of planned.
Rows respond to three gestures:
- ›Tap to tick it paid, or untick it
- ›Swipe left to edit it (Thrive)
- ›Swipe right for its details
Before you have a budget
With no active budget the screen shows Welcome to BetterBudgets and a Get Started button that opens the Budget Builder, rather than an empty tracker — there are no paychecks to display until a budget defines them.
If you have budgets but still see this screen, none of them is active. Make one active from the Archive.
If your profile has no first name, the greeting at the top says Guest. Saving a budget requires an account. See Setting Up Your Account.
On the Free plan
Free shows the full bill list for the upcoming paycheck only. Other paychecks in the strip are blurred with a prompt to upgrade. Editing amounts, adding expenses and Canvas are Thrive features, and Coming Up looks one paycheck ahead instead of three. See Free vs. Thrive.
The routine
The screen is built around a specific, short habit:
Open it on payday. Work down the bills. Tick things off 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.