Moving Between Paychecks
Your budget is a sequence of pay periods, and the home screen shows one at a time. The Paychecks control moves you through them.
Where you start
The app opens on your current paycheck — the period you're living in right now. Most of the time that's exactly where you want to be, and you'll never touch the navigation.
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.
Looking back
Stepping backward shows completed periods — what was due, what you marked off, what you didn't. Useful for checking whether a bill you thought you'd handled actually got marked, and for seeing where things started slipping if your numbers look off.
If navigation doesn't work
If you're told there are no paycheck dates to navigate to, the app doesn't have a pay schedule to work from. That comes from your next payday and pay frequency in the Builder — see Income & Current Savings.
The usual causes:
- ›No active budget is selected. Make one active from the Archive.
- ›The budget was built without a valid next payday.
- ›Your budget's plan window has ended, so there are no further periods.
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 Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.
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
Each pay period has its own Canvas page, loaded with that period's bills. Moving between paychecks moves you between canvases, so notes you sketch for one period stay attached to it.