Moving Between Paychecks
Your budget is a sequence of pay periods, and the home screen shows one at a time. There are three ways to move between them.
Where you start
The app opens on your current paycheck — the first one dated today or later. Most of the time that's exactly where you want to be.
Three ways to move
The paycheck strip. Scroll the cards along the top and tap one to switch to it.
The arrows. Either side of the paycheck amount, they step to the previous or next paycheck without scrolling the strip. The strip follows along.
Coming Up. Tap any row to jump straight to the paycheck that covers it.
Looking ahead
Stepping forward shows you a future pay period with its bills already assigned. This answers the question that monthly budgets can't: what does the check after next actually have to cover?
It's worth doing before you commit to anything discretionary. A period with an annual insurance premium and a quarterly bill landing together looks very different from the one before it, and knowing that in advance is the point of planning on a pay schedule rather than a calendar.
Coming Up at the bottom of the screen gives you the short version without moving: the bills still unticked on the next three paychecks (one on Free).
Looking back
Stepping backward shows earlier periods — what was due, what you ticked, what you didn't. Useful for checking whether a bill you thought you'd handled actually got ticked, and for seeing where things started slipping if your numbers look off.
Where you can make changes
You can look at any paycheck, but ticking, editing and adding only work on the previous, current and next paycheck. See Completing Bills.
On Free, the bills on paychecks other than the current one are blurred behind an upgrade prompt. See Free vs. Thrive.
If there are no paychecks
If the Track tab shows Welcome to BetterBudgets instead of paychecks, the app has no active budget to draw them from. Make one active from the Archive, or build one.
If you're on the last paycheck and the arrows don't go further, you've reached the end of the plan window. Rebuild to extend it. See Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.
When the dates look wrong
If paychecks are landing on dates that don't match your real pay calendar, the anchor is off. Every period is counted forward from the next payday you entered, so if that date was wrong — or your employer shifted the cycle since you built the budget — the whole sequence is shifted with it.
Fix the date in the Builder and rebuild. See Income & Current Savings.
If the dates are right but the bills are on the wrong paychecks, that's a due-date problem on the individual bills rather than a pay-schedule problem. See Expenses.
Canvas follows the paycheck
The Canvas button opens the Canvas page for the paycheck you're on, with that period's bills on hand. Moving between paychecks moves you between canvases, so notes you sketch for one period stay attached to it.