Budgets
A budget in AI Money is an amount attached to an expense category. You do not build a whole plan up front: you put a number on groceries, and the app tells you how you are doing.
Setting one
Open Budgets, pick a category, enter the amount. Removing a budget is setting it to zero.
Two kinds exist:
- Monthly: one fixed amount, the same every month. This is the default and it is what most people want.
- Per month: a different amount for each of the twelve months. December is not January, and a fixed number pretends otherwise. Categories with this kind show a twelve bar mini chart with the current month highlighted.
Income categories cannot have budgets, since a limit on money coming in is not a thing.
Reading the screen
The donut at the top is total used: everything spent against everything budgeted, for the categories you are looking at. The arc stops at 100%, the number does not, so going over is visible rather than hidden.
Each category card shows its percentage and the amount left.
What counts against a budget
The same rules as everywhere else in the app: only real spending. Transfers between your accounts, savings deposits, opening balances and balance adjustments never consume a budget.
The percentage is always anchored to the budget's own period, not to the date filter you happen to have on screen. A budget you set for the month means the month, whatever range you are browsing.
Budgets and currencies
Budgets live per currency, the same way accounts do. In the peso world you see and set peso budgets. Switching the currency lens switches which budgets you are looking at, so a dollar budget and a peso budget never get added together into a number that means nothing.