Budgeting app questions,
answered.

Ridgeline Budget is a planning-first budget tool. You decide before the month begins how much you're allowed to spend on needs, and you fund wants from savings envelopes. Most apps track what you spent and show you the damage after. Some are closer in philosophy but subscription-based and bank-linked.

Key differences: no bank account linking (you enter amounts manually), full end-to-end encryption, free to start with optional paid sync, and a specific focus on closing the month and distributing surplus to budget envelopes.

Yes - an account is required to use Ridgeline Budget. However, creating an account is free and takes about a minute. The free tier has no time limit and no payment required.

Free accounts are limited to 5 budgets, 2 income sources, and 30 expenses, and do not include sync across multiple devices. A paid plan is required to remove those limits and enable multi-device sync and partner collaboration.

Yes. The free tier requires no payment and no credit card. Create a free account and start budgeting immediately. The free tier is limited to 5 budgets, 2 income sources, and 30 expenses - enough for most households.

A paid plan unlocks unlimited items, sync across devices, and partner collaboration.

Two paid options are available: a $3/month subscription (includes all future features) or a $35 one-time purchase (includes most future features - significant additions may require a separate purchase). There are no ads either way.

Most people give up on budgeting apps because they require either constant manual entry (exhausting) or automatic bank syncing that feels like surveillance. Ridgeline Budget takes a middle path: you enter one number per spending source per day - the amount spent in the current month for each spending source. That's it.

The system does the math. You review what looks like a want vs. a need, tag it, and move on. The daily check-in takes under 5 minutes once you're comfortable with the flow.

Needs are things you have to pay regardless: rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, car payment, phone bill. These form your base monthly budget.

Wants are discretionary: dining out, entertainment, clothing, hobbies. In Ridgeline Budget, wants must come from a budget envelope - a pot of money you've already saved up from previous surplus months.

The line isn't always clear, and that's okay. You decide what counts as a need for your household. The system enforces the accounting, not the morality.

That's a deficit month. Before closing, you'll need to zero the balance by pulling money from a budget. The recommended approach is to create a "Expensive Months" priority budget specifically for this purpose - it fills up during good months and cushions you during rough ones.

If that budget is empty, you can pull from your personal or savings budgets. Enter it as an Extra Income line linked to the source budget, which reduces that budget's balance and zeroes the month.

If you close the month with a deficit, the system will pull money from budgets. Budgets with a higher balance will be reduced more than budgets with a lower or negative balance. Budgets can go negative in this scenario.

Yes. On the Income page, you can mark each income source as something you depend on or not. For variable income, enter a conservative base number you're confident about, and leave the rest as "extra income" entered on the Progress page when it arrives.

Because the system doesn't require bank syncing, you're in full control of when income enters the calculation. Many freelancers enter client payments only when they clear.

Yes - the Income screen supports five pay frequencies: weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly, every 6 months, and yearly. The app converts whichever frequency you choose to a monthly equivalent for the surplus calculation.

You can also add any number of deductions per income source - taxes, 401k contributions, health insurance premiums, or anything else withheld from your paycheck. Each deduction has a label and a gross amount. The app subtracts all deductions from the source's gross amount to arrive at the net monthly income used in your budget.

The Progress page is where you track spending in real time. It has four sections:

• Spending Sources - the various ways you spend money. Each shows what you've spent on it this month, totalled up from the entries charged to it.
• Spending - everything you spent this month. Attach a budget to an entry and it comes out of that envelope instead of your surplus.
• Extra Income - any money that arrived outside your regular income. Bonuses, reimbursements, etc.
• Manual Adjustments - direct budget adjustments when something needs to be corrected.

Daily use is typically just updating Spending Sources (30 seconds) and attaching budgets to anything from the last 24 hours that came out of an envelope.

Every purchase goes in the Spending list, and each one is charged to a spending source. Whether you attach a budget to it decides where the money comes from:

• Budget attached - the amount is debited from that envelope and left out of the "net spending" calculation, so it doesn't count against your monthly target
• No budget - ordinary day-to-day spending, counted against your surplus like anything else

Either way the amount lands on the account's total right away, so your balances stay right. You can attach or remove a budget later by editing the entry; the amount moves between your surplus and that envelope, and the account total doesn't change.

Example: you took the family out to dinner for $120. Attach the "Family" budget. Your monthly math is unaffected; the Family budget decreases by $120.

Enter the amount, pick the account it was paid from, and tick Needs Review. The amount lands on the account straight away so your balance stays right, and the entry is parked on the Dashboard until you decide.

Ticking that box is the one case where the budget is optional - every other entry needs one. While it sits there with no budget it counts against your surplus like ordinary spending. When you settle it, pick a budget and untick the box: the amount moves out of your surplus and into that envelope, and the account total doesn't change.

A source can't be deleted while entries with a real amount are still charged to it. Those entries hold actual money: deleting the source would drop them out of every account total while they carried on counting against your surplus or drawing down a budget, and nothing on screen would show it had happened.

Reattribute those entries to another source, or delete them, and the source can then be removed. Bills sitting at $0 don't block it - those are placeholders waiting to be recorded and are rebuilt from your Expenses Calendar each month anyway.

Extra Income adds money to the surplus calculation. Use it for bonuses, side income, reimbursements you want to treat as income, or - when combined with a "From Budget" selection - transfers from a budget to cover a deficit.

Manual Adjustments adjust a budget's balance directly without affecting the surplus calculation. Use it for budget-to-budget transfers, corrections, or when you receive a reimbursement that simply restores what was spent.

Both support a "Keep on Close" option for entries that recur every month - like a standing personal-to-savings transfer.

Priority - gets its share of surplus before standard budgets. Best for goals with a target: vacation fund, emergency fund, car maintenance. Set a maximum so the priority fill knows when to stop.

Standard - shares the remaining surplus proportionally or by a percentage split. Good for personal spending money, general savings, any budget you want to grow steadily.

Skip Auto-Fill - never receives surplus. Best for tracking reimbursable expenses, recording money borrowed, or any accounting that shouldn't affect the distribution.

A Monthly Allowance is a fixed amount added to a budget every month, separate from the surplus distribution. It's reserved directly from your spending money before surplus is calculated - so the budget gets topped up every month regardless of whether you have a surplus.

Use an allowance for budgets that need a guaranteed monthly contribution, such as a personal spending envelope each partner controls individually, or a recurring household contribution that shouldn't depend on the month going well.

It's a priority budget with a generous maximum (e.g. $1,000-$2,000). During good months, it gets priority fill. When you have a deficit month - spent more than you earned - you pull from this budget via an Extra Income entry to zero the balance before closing.

It acts as a buffer between real life and your other savings. Without it, a single unexpected expense forces you to raid vacation or auto funds.

Yes. Create a Skip Auto-Fill budget called "Work Reimbursements" (or similar). When you buy something reimbursable, add a Spending entry attributed to that budget. The budget balance goes negative - reflecting money owed to you.

When the reimbursement arrives, add a Manual Adjustment to that budget for the reimbursed amount. Balance returns to zero. The cycle repeats. None of this affects your monthly surplus calculation.

This effectively borrows money from your other budgets until the reimbursement arrives.

The Expenses Calendar budget is a system-managed envelope that accumulates month by month to cover your planned expenses. When you close a month, the amounts from your funded expenses are credited to this budget so it has money ready when each bill arrives.

It can't be deleted because the app relies on it for the Expenses accounting to work correctly. It also doesn't receive surplus - it has its own funding path.

Every recurring bill sits in one table, and its spending source - the account it's paid from - decides how the app treats it.

Give it a card or account you also spend from day to day and the expense is funded: money accumulates for it in the Expenses Calendar budget, it's seeded into Spending when the month closes, and it turns up under upcoming bills with a Record Now button.

Leave the source blank - Automatic draft - for bills that leave an account you never spend from directly, like a loan payment or a utility auto-pay. They still reduce what you have available to spend each month, but nothing is set aside for them and they never ask to be recorded. Enter them once and forget them.

The section header and the table foot both show the funded/automatic split so you can see at a glance how your bills divide.

A red ⚠ means the expense names a spending source that no longer exists - usually because that source was deleted or renamed somewhere else. The expense has quietly stopped funding the Expenses Calendar budget.

Pick a live source from the row's dropdown to fix it. Re-creating a source with that exact name also works: the expense reconnects on its own, because expenses remember their source by name.

Yes. A refunded month, a provider credit, a reimbursed premium - enter it as a negative number and it nets against the rest of the row. This works in the grid cells, the add-expense form, the bulk amount tool, and CSV import.

Only an amount of exactly 0 means "nothing due this month" and clears the cell. Note that accounting-style parentheses - (250) - are not read as a negative on CSV import; use a leading minus sign instead.

Enter your best estimate per month in the Expenses Calendar. For utilities, look at last year's bills and use month-specific amounts - higher in summer if you have AC, higher in winter for heat.

The individual cell in the expenses table is always editable. If the actual bill arrives and is different, update the cell for that month. The difference will naturally play out in the monthly surplus.

Ridgeline Budget uses AES-256-GCM encryption. When you enable encryption, a key is generated and stored only in your browser's local storage. Before any data is sent to the server, it's encrypted with this key. The server stores an unreadable ciphertext - it never sees the key.

Random key = strongest. A random 256-bit key is generated automatically. Passphrase = a key derived from a phrase you choose. Choose a long, random phrase (4+ unrelated words) for good security.

If you lose the device that holds the encryption key and have no backup, your data is unrecoverable. We cannot decrypt it for you - we don't have the key.

Best practices to prevent this:

• Export a backup regularly (Settings → Data Backup → Export)
• With your backup file, simply import it on your new device into a new Workspace and apply a fresh encryption.
• Transfer the key to multiple devices using the Encryption panel in Settings
• Store your exported JSON backup in a password manager or encrypted cloud storage

The tradeoff for strong privacy is personal responsibility for key management.

Passkeys are a modern, password-free sign-in method that uses your device's built-in authentication - Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, or a device PIN. They're more secure than passwords because they're unique to each site and can't be phished.

You can register a passkey under Settings → Passkeys → Add Passkey. Give it a name (e.g. "My iPhone") and your device will prompt you. You can register passkeys on multiple devices and delete any of them at any time.

Yes. Both are available in Settings → Account. To change your password, enter your current password and a new one. To delete your account, type DELETE in the confirmation field - this permanently removes all your data from the server.

Before deleting: export a backup first (Settings → Data Backup → Export) if you want a copy of your data.