Features
Bank Synchronization
Fresh Budgets will automatically and regularly synchronize data from your financial institutions. This includes savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, loans, and more.
We partner with Plaid to connect to your banks. Plaid is a trusted provider for consumer financial information.
Manual Review
We don't believe in automatic budgeting. Too many systems get it wrong or change the budget after you've already adjusted it.
With Fresh Budgets, you control the categorization from pending to reviewed. You'll be notified of new transactions, and you can control exactly which envelopes are used.
Reviewing a transaction only takes about 10 seconds, including splits. It's so easy, you can even do this on your phone anytime you've got 2-3 minutes.
Once reviewed, all of your balances are updated immediately. If you're unsure of a transaction, just skip it and come back later.
This is one of the biggest reasons Fresh Budgets exists, to control where spending comes from.It's a core principle that will never change at Fresh Budgets.
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Any Budgeting Method
Fresh Budgets is a tool that helps you track budgets, expenses, and income. While it works exceptionally well for envelope budgeting and leaky bucket budgeting, the core features of assigning money to budget work for any system.
Envelope Budgeting stipulates that every dollar of income goes into an envelope, and every dollar spent comes from an envelope. Our system has accurate ledgers to make sure money is never lost or reassigned. Every ledger is an envelope and rolls over month to month. When you receive income, distribute it among your envelopes as you see fit.
Leaky Bucket Budgeting is the methodology that our founder uses. Think of your savings like a big bucket. All your income drops into that bucket and all your expenses are holes that let the water out. So long as more money goes in the top than goes out, you have a balanced budget.
Zero-Based Budgeting is similar to envelope budgeting, just make sure that your "Savings Plan" on the Dashboard equals $0 when you're done setting up budgets.
Pay-Yourself-First Budgeting focuses primarily on savings and debt repayment. Before you create budgets for discretionary spending, create them for savings and debt payments. Watch the "Savings Plan" number to make sure you're not spending too much.
You get the idea. With Fresh Budgets, you budget the way you want, and we'll track the balances, receipts, and schedules.
Split Transactions
A single transaction can have expenses from multiple budgets. During the manual review, it's easy to split a transaction into multiple envelopes.
As you enter the budget name and amount associated, an additional line will appear automatically for the next budget. No additional buttons to press or steps to follow.
Positive amounts are always income, and negative amounts are always expenses. On a single receipt for $5, you can track a refund of $10 to your Groceries budget and an expense of -$15 from your Gifts budget.
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Rollover
Our envelopes are real ledgers, just like your bank accounts. And like your bank account, they roll over at the end of the month. You would expect the same of real, physical envelopes in your house.
This is one core piece of Fresh Budgets. We're not just categorizing and reporting on how you spend your money. No, we're actually setting up ledgers for you to manage as if they were real envelopes or bank accounts.
Transfer Funds
Plans are never perfect. Whether it's a high electric bill, an unexpected flat tire, or ill-timed medical expenses, your budgeting will need some flexibility.
Money can be transferred between envelopes without any hassle. To cover the extra bill, take some from vacation, dates, or directly from savings. It may also be a good time to re-evaluate your rainy day budget.
The opposite works just as well. If you spent less money on bills, transfer the money to dates, and enjoy a well-deserved evening.
Account Sharing
We built Fresh Budgets for households, families, and partners. We believe that in a functioning relationship, money is accessible and transparent.
So, Fresh Budgets has household sharing. Invite your spouse, your partner, your accountant, and your dog.
With a spouse, partner, or family, you can access balances, review transactions, and keep budgets up-to-date together, without having to share a password.
Even better, our sharing features are built in to every account. Unlimited users!
Mixed Schedules
Not every budget fits the same schedule. And most don't start at the same time.
Christmas is once a year like birthdays, while your paycheck is twice a month or every two weeks. Your insurance bill could be every 6 months, and your trash bill every 3 months. You might take your kids out once every 3 weeks.
This is the exact type of thing software should handle for you. We track the schedules and calculate the math to make sure your budgets are correct all the time.
We don't require the traditional every budget every month guidelines, but we'll support you if you want to do it that way.
Quick Balances
See all of your balances for all of your budgets, bills, goals, reimbursements, and income in one reliable place.
Our color-coded, easy-to-read, always-updated balance overview is a handy reference to know exactly where you're at with all of your envelopes.
Each overview shows current balance, cycle progress, and details about next cycle.
If you want to know if you splurge a little today, we've got you covered.
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Notifications
With manual review and bank synchronization, tracking your budgets becomes very easy. The only thing you've got to do is stay on top of reviewing transactions as they come in.
To help you with that effort, we have email and push notifications.
When transactions are ready to review, you'll receive a notification specifying how many transactions are ready. When you free up for a minute, review the transactions and look at your updated balances.
Staying on top of these will help you avoid the weekly or monthly grind of going through every receipt. It's generally easy to remember what you spent money on 1-2 days ago.
Ignore Transactions
Some transactions don't affect your envelopes, like paying a credit card, transferring money, or receiving assets. For those transactions, there's an 'Ignore' button.
Take the credit card, for example. When you spend money on the credit card, you'll take the money from envelopes to cover it. When you pay the credit card with a bank transfer, you don't want to spend money again to cover the balance. Instead, just mark the payment (and receipt of the payment) as ignored.
When you ignore a transaction, that transaction will not affect any envelopes and will not trigger notifications anymore.
Ignored transactions can be filtered, unignored, and reviewed later.
Bottom Line
There are two numbers that matter when you're evaluating your budgeting: your savings balance and your savings plan.
Your Savings Balance tells you how much money you have in your bank account, minus the money owed on credit cards, minus the money in your envelopes. The envelopes is the critical part, because evelope money is not savings, it's money with a job. All this information, even broken down by account, is available on the dashboard.
Your Savings Plan tells you the effect your spending will have on your savings this month. Spending more money than you make is the number one no-no in budgeting. As you create new budgets, update existing budgets, and archive old budgets, we will present a single number that represents your plan's effect on your savings balance each month.
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Envelope Types
To help categorize your envelopes, we've broken them down into the following types:
Budgets are for a specific purpose like groceries, entertainment, and clothing.
Bills are regularly recurring expenses like utilities, services, and loan payments.
Goals are things that you save up for like vacations, retirement, and rainy days.
Reimbursements track money owed between family, friends, and work reimbursements.
Income are sources of money including paychecks, interest, and tips.
Fresh Start
We've all been there, good intentions to follow a budget, but life got in the way. That's no reason to give up or to stop budgeting.
Our Fresh Start option will keep your transaction history, savings balances, and all your current envelopes, but it will clean everything up so that you can start over and stay on top of it this time. All you have to do is pick which day you'd like to start over from. We'll do the rest.