Single-page reference. Jump to any letter, or use your browser's Find (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) to locate a term. Anywhere in the app, tooltips and inline help link straight to the matching anchor here.

401(k): An employer-sponsored retirement account. Track it in Project Budget as a tracking account so contributions and growth show up in net worth without inflating Ready to Assign.
Terms starting with A
Active profile: The profile currently loaded in the app — its accounts, categories, and transactions are the ones you see and edit. Switch profiles to work with separate budgets without their data mixing.
Activity: The sum of spending in a category during the current month. Inflow transactions to a category show as positive activity.
APR: Annual Percentage Rate — the yearly interest a card or loan charges on a carried balance. Project Budget does not calculate APR for you; it is shown here so you recognize the line item on a statement.
Assigned: The dollar amount you have committed to a category for the current month. Assigning does not move money between accounts — it just labels intent.
Assignment history: A report that shows every change you have made to a category's Assigned amount over time, so you can see when and why a budget grew or shrank.
Auto-assign: A one-click action that fills underfunded categories using their goals or last month's spending as a guide. Useful at the start of the month to draft a budget you can then refine.
Available: What is left in a category after subtracting activity from assigned and adding any carry-in from the previous month.
Terms starting with B
Brokerage account: A taxable investment account holding stocks, ETFs, or funds. Track it as a tracking account so market value contributes to net worth without affecting the envelope budget.
Budget vs. actual: A report comparing what you assigned to each category against what you actually spent. The gap tells you where your budget and your real life disagree.
Build-a-balance goal: A goal type that keeps adding to a category until you tell it to stop — useful for an open-ended emergency fund where there is no specific deadline.
Terms starting with C
Carry-over: The available balance in a category at month-end rolls into the same category's starting balance next month. Negative available in an on-budget category does not roll; it reduces next month's Ready to Assign.
Cash account: An on-budget account representing physical cash in your wallet, envelope, or safe. Tracked the same as a checking account — you add inflows when you withdraw and outflows when you spend.
Cash flow: Money moving in and out of your accounts over a period of time. Positive cash flow means inflows exceeded outflows; negative means the reverse — useful at a glance but less actionable than the envelope view.
Cash-back: A reward some credit cards pay for purchases, usually a small percentage of spending. Record it as an inflow to Ready to Assign when it posts, or directly to a category if it offsets a specific expense.
Cashflow projection: A forward-looking report estimating account balances based on scheduled transactions and recurring patterns. Useful for spotting a tight week before it arrives.
Category: An envelope you assign money to and spend from — Groceries, Rent, Car Repair, and so on. Every outflow on an on-budget account should land in exactly one category (or be a split across several).
Checking account: The everyday on-budget account most people use for paychecks, bills, and debit-card spending. Its balance feeds Ready to Assign.
Cleared: A transaction that has shown up on your bank or card's online register but has not yet been confirmed during reconciliation. Cleared sits between pending and reconciled.
Closed account: An account you have stopped using. Closing in Project Budget hides the account from day-to-day views but preserves its history, so old transactions still show up in reports.
Command palette: A keyboard-driven menu (usually opened with Ctrl/Cmd + K) that lets you jump to any screen, account, or action without using the sidebar.
Credit card account: An on-budget account for a card you carry. Project Budget pairs every credit card with a payment category so the cash to cover each swipe is set aside as you spend.
Credit card payment category: Created automatically with every credit card account. As you spend against the card, an equal amount moves from the spent category into this one — so the cash is set aside to pay the bill.
CSV: Comma-separated values — a plain-text spreadsheet format most banks offer as a transaction export. Project Budget reads CSV via the format detector and lets you confirm the column mapping before importing.
Terms starting with D
Debt overview: A report summarizing every credit card, loan, and other liability you track, with balances and (if entered) interest rates side by side.
Discretionary: Spending you choose to do — dining out, hobbies, gifts. Useful as a label on categories so you can see at a glance how much of your budget is optional versus required.
Duplicate detection: A check the importer runs against your existing transactions so the same purchase is not added twice when you re-import an overlapping CSV or OFX file.
Terms starting with E
Envelope: The mental model behind Project Budget: every dollar you have is stuffed into a labeled envelope (a category), and you can only spend from an envelope that has cash in it. Borrowed from the cash-in-envelopes method made famous by household finance writers and modernized by YNAB and Actual.
Export: Download a complete copy of your active profile as a JSON file. Use exports as backups, to move between devices, or to archive a year before closing it out.
Terms starting with F
FAB: Floating Action Button — the round button anchored to the lower corner of the screen that opens the quick-add transaction menu on every page.
Format detector: The piece of the importer that figures out whether the file you uploaded is CSV, OFX, QFX, or QIF, and picks the right parser without you choosing one manually.
Frequency: How often a recurring or scheduled transaction repeats — weekly, every two weeks, monthly, annually, or a custom interval.
Terms starting with G
Goal: A target you set on a category. Four shapes are available: monthly fixed (need this amount each month), reach a target by a date, build a balance, and spending limit.
Terms starting with H
HELOC: Home Equity Line of Credit — a revolving loan secured by your house. Track the balance as a tracking liability so it reduces net worth like any other debt.
HSA: Health Savings Account, paired with a high-deductible health plan. The cash portion can be an on-budget account; any invested portion is better as a tracking account.
Terms starting with I
Import profile: Load a previously exported JSON file into Project Budget as a new profile. The original file is unchanged.
Income vs. expense: A report stacking total inflows against total outflows per month. The fastest way to see whether you are spending more than you are earning.
Inflow: Money coming into an account — a paycheck, a refund, a gift, a transfer-in. Inflows to on-budget accounts usually land in Ready to Assign unless you direct them to a specific category.
IRA: Individual Retirement Account, traditional or Roth. Track as a tracking account so contributions and market changes show in net worth without affecting the envelope budget.
Terms starting with K
KPI: Key Performance Indicator — a single headline number, such as Ready to Assign or this month's savings rate, surfaced in a tile at the top of a screen.
Terms starting with L
Loan: Any borrowed money you owe back over time — auto, student, personal. Track as a tracking liability so the balance subtracts from net worth.
localStorage: The browser-built storage Project Budget uses to keep every profile on your own device. Nothing leaves your machine — back up by exporting regularly.
Terms starting with M
Mapping: During import, the step where you tell Project Budget which column of your CSV is the date, which is the payee, and which is the amount. The format detector guesses; you confirm.
Memo: Free-text note attached to a transaction — anything that helps Future You remember what the line was about. Memos do not affect categorization or reports but are searchable.
Minimum payment: The smallest amount a credit card issuer will accept against the statement balance without penalty. Paying only the minimum keeps the account in good standing but lets interest compound.
Modal: A focused dialog that pops over the rest of the page — used in Project Budget for editing a transaction, confirming a delete, or configuring a goal.
Monthly fixed goal: A goal type that asks you to assign the same amount every month — your rent, your subscription bundle, your gym membership. Marks the category underfunded if the assigned amount is short.
Monthly trends: A report charting category spending across many months so you can spot a creeping grocery bill or seasonal utility swing.
Mortgage: A loan secured by your house. Track as a tracking liability; the monthly payment itself flows through the budget like any other expense.
Move money: Reassign already-assigned dollars from one category to another without touching Ready to Assign. The everyday cure for an overspent envelope.
Terms starting with N
Net worth: Total assets (every account's balance, including tracking accounts) minus total liabilities (loans, credit card balances, mortgage). Shown over time as a line chart in reports.
Non-discretionary: Spending you cannot really avoid — rent, utilities, basic groceries, insurance. Knowing your monthly non-discretionary floor tells you the minimum income the budget needs.
Terms starting with O
OFX: Open Financial Exchange — an older banking-data format some institutions still export. Project Budget reads OFX via the format detector.
On-budget account: An account whose balance contributes to Ready to Assign. Checking, savings, cash, and credit cards are typically on-budget.
Outflow: Money leaving an account — a purchase, a bill, a transfer-out. Outflows on on-budget accounts reduce available in their category.
Outstanding: Transactions you have entered but the bank has not yet shown — usually a check that has not been cashed. Outstanding items keep your register balance and the bank balance from matching until they finally clear.
Overspent: A category whose activity exceeded its available. You fix overspending by using Move money to top it up from another category, not by ignoring it.
Terms starting with P
Pay yourself first: The habit of assigning money to savings and long-term goals at the top of the month, before any discretionary categories. The opposite of saving whatever is left over (which is usually nothing).
Payee: Who the money went to (or came from) on a transaction — Trader Joe's, your landlord, your employer. Payees are reusable and power the payee leaderboard report.
Payee leaderboard: A report ranking payees by total spending over a period. Often surprising — small recurring charges can outrank a single big purchase.
Pending: A transaction the bank or card issuer has authorized but not yet finalized. Pending amounts can change; wait until they post before treating them as final.
Pill: A small rounded-rectangle label used in the UI to tag a category, account type, or filter state. Compact and clickable — click a pill to filter by it.
Post now: An action on a scheduled transaction that books it today instead of on its next planned date. Handy when a bill arrives early.
Posted: A transaction the bank has finalized. Posted is the opposite of pending — the amount is fixed and ready for reconciliation.
Profile: A self-contained budget: accounts, categories, transactions, goals, and settings. Useful for keeping a household budget separate from, say, a side-business budget. Switch between profiles without their data ever mixing.
Terms starting with Q
QFX: Quicken Financial Exchange — a Quicken-flavored variant of OFX. The format detector handles it the same way.
QIF: Quicken Interchange Format — Quicken's older plain-text export. Less precise than CSV for dates and amounts; usable, but confirm the mapping carefully.
Quick budget: A shortcut that fills a category's assigned using last month's spending, last month's assigned, or the category's goal target — one click instead of typing the number.
Terms starting with R
Ready to Assign: Money you have received but not yet given a job. It comes from inflow transactions you marked as ready-to-assign and any unassigned balance carrying over from prior months.
Reconciled: A transaction that has been confirmed against a bank or card statement during reconciliation and is now locked from edits. Reconciled is the strongest of the three transaction states (pending, cleared, reconciled).
Reconciliation: The process of matching your Project Budget account balance to the balance shown by the bank or card issuer. Reconciled transactions are locked to prevent edits.
Recurring transaction: A transaction template that posts automatically on a frequency you set — your Netflix charge, your paycheck, your rent. Recurring entries also feed the cashflow projection.
Reports: Project Budget's collection of read-only views over your data: net worth, income vs. expense, spending by category, payee leaderboard, monthly trends, debt overview, and more.
Reward category: A credit card category — gas, groceries, dining — that earns a higher cash-back rate. Project Budget does not track reward tiers for you; this is here so you recognize the term when you read your card's offer.
Roll-over: Another name for carry-over — positive available in a category at month-end becomes that category's starting balance next month.
Terms starting with S
Savings account: An on-budget account for money you do not plan to spend right away. Often paired with a sinking fund category for a specific upcoming purchase.
Savings rate: The share of inflows you direct toward savings categories instead of spending categories, usually shown as a percentage in reports.
Scheduled transaction: A transaction set to post on a future date — like a check you have written but not yet mailed, or a bill auto-paid next Friday. Scheduled items feed the cashflow projection and can be posted now or skipped.
Sidebar: The vertical navigation column on the left of the app. Lists your budget views, accounts, reports, and settings. Collapsible on narrow screens.
Sinking fund: A category you assign to monthly even though you only spend from it occasionally — a quarterly insurance bill, an annual domain renewal, a holiday-gifts envelope. By the time the bill arrives, the money is already there.
Skip: Mark a single occurrence of a scheduled transaction as not happening this time, without changing the underlying frequency. The next occurrence still posts as planned.
Snapshot: A point-in-time copy of your active profile's state, useful for rolling back if something goes sideways. Project Budget can keep recent snapshots in localStorage.
Spending by category: A report showing how much each category consumed over a date range, sortable largest-first to spot where the money actually went.
Spending-limit goal: A goal type that caps a category at a maximum — useful for dining out or entertainment where the point is to not exceed a number.
Split transaction: A single transaction whose amount is divided across two or more categories — for example, a grocery store run that included household supplies.
Statement balance: What a credit card issuer says you owed as of the statement closing date. Pay this in full by the due date to avoid interest; the payment category should hold the cash already.
Terms starting with T
Target-by-date goal: A goal type that divides a savings target across the months between now and a deadline. Project Budget shows how much to assign each month to land on time.
Tile: A self-contained card on a dashboard, usually showing a KPI, a chart, or a quick action. Tiles can usually be clicked to drill into the underlying view.
Tippy tooltip: A small hover or focus tooltip used throughout the app to explain icons and abbreviations without crowding the screen. Powered by the open-source Tippy.js library.
Toast: A brief notification that slides in from the corner of the screen and dismisses itself — used to confirm a save, warn about a duplicate, or report an import result.
Tracking account: An account whose balance counts toward net worth but not toward Ready to Assign. Investments, home value, vehicles, mortgages, and loans are tracking accounts.
Tracking asset: A tracking account on the asset side — a brokerage, 401(k), IRA, vehicle value, or home value.
Tracking liability: A tracking account on the debt side — a mortgage, student loan, auto loan, or HELOC. Reduces net worth.
Transfer: A movement of money between two of your own accounts. Transfers are entered once and Project Budget creates the matching entry in the other account.
Trash: Where deleted transactions, categories, or accounts go before they are permanently removed. Restore from Trash if you delete by accident; empty Trash to commit the deletions.
Terms starting with U
Uncategorized: A transaction that has not yet been assigned to a category. Project Budget surfaces uncategorized counts in the register so they do not sit unnoticed and skew reports.
Underfunded: A category whose assigned amount is less than its goal calls for this month. Auto-assign and Quick budget both target underfunded categories first.
Terms starting with W
Whole budget: Actions that apply across every category at once — for example, auto-assigning all underfunded categories in one click instead of opening each.
Terms starting with Z
Zero-based budget: A budget where every dollar of Ready to Assign has been given a job — assigned to a category, saved toward a goal, or set aside for a sinking fund — so the unassigned total is zero. The discipline at the heart of envelope budgeting.