A budget that resets to zero every month punishes restraint: under-spend in March and April and you get nothing back. Rollover fixes that. What you didn't spend carries forward, so good months buy slack in tight ones.
Turning it on
Open a monthly budget and switch on Rollover. Two more choices appear.
If you overspend. Pick one:
- Start fresh next month. The month you went over is forgiven. Next month opens at the full amount. This is the default, and it's the right answer for most spending. If you blow through groceries in March, you are not realistically going to eat less in April to pay it back.
- Carry the overspend too. The overage comes off next month, and later good months pay it down. Useful for a category you are actively disciplining, or one where you expect the money back, like spending you will be reimbursed for.
Cap. Optional. The most that can pile up, so 6 frugal months don't build a war chest that hides your real spending. A cap only ever limits money carried forward. It never limits an overspend you chose to carry.
A worked month
Groceries: 450 a month, rollover on, set to start fresh.
- March. You spend 380. The 70 you didn't spend carries.
- April. Your effective budget is 450 + 70 = 520. You spend 505, so you're still inside thanks to March. 15 carries.
- May. Starts at 465.
Now the same numbers with carry the overspend too, and an April where you spent 540 instead. You went 20 over, so May starts at 450 − 20 = 430. The overspend didn't vanish. It borrowed.
What carries
The carry compounds. Three quiet months in a row stack up, not just the most recent one.
Rollover applies to monthly budgets. A yearly budget already spreads across the whole year, so there's no month end for anything to carry into, and the setting isn't offered there.
Bucket budgets in Flex mode carry the same way, with the same choice about overspending.
Where the counting starts
Switching rollover on does not reach back and hand you credit for months you never thought about it. Counting begins with the first full month after you turned it on. Turn it on halfway through September and October is the first month that can produce a carry, because you never had a September limit to come in under.
The same rule applies to a brand-new budget. It starts counting from the month after you create it.
You can move that starting point. Open the budget, and under Rollover you'll find Count the carry from. It lists every month you could start from, each with the figure that choice would actually produce, so you are picking a number rather than guessing at one.
Two useful things live in that one list:
- Pick an earlier month to give yourself credit for a stretch you were already under budget.
- Pick this month to start fresh. There are no earlier months left to fold in, so the carry becomes zero and next month builds from here. Your budget, its amount and its history all stay exactly as they were.
If you change a budget's amount, past months keep the amount they had at the time. Raising groceries from 450 to 600 in September does not retroactively decide you under-spent by more in June.
A month you never filled in
Life happens and the app goes quiet for a while. Say you stop entering anything in May, June and July, then come back in August.
Those three months neither earn nor lose you anything. A month with no transactions at all is a month we know nothing about, so the carry passes straight through it rather than crediting you a full budget you may well have spent. A month where you did record transactions but none in this category is different — that is a real zero, and it earns the full amount.
Go back and fill May in later and the whole chain re-counts on its own. May's leftover flows into June, June's result into July, and so on up to now. Nothing needs repairing, because the carry is worked out fresh every time you look at it rather than stored.
When that happens, we tell you. Save an entry dated into a month that has already been and gone and a short note says which months were re-counted and what the budget carries now, with an undo if that wasn't what you meant. Moving a category to a different parent or a different bucket does the same thing, for the same reason — its past spending moves with it — and you get the same note.
Where you'll see it
On the Monthly tab, the carried amount appears on the card and is folded into the number the progress bar is scored against. The row underneath reads "left to roll over" rather than "left", so you can tell at a glance which rule is running. If a cap would stop some of it, the card says how much actually rolls over.
Budget alerts use that same number and now say so. A 5,000 budget carrying 3,000 reads "80% of 8,000, which is your 5,000 budget plus 3,000 carried in" — not a bare percentage you would have to reverse-engineer.
A month that opens smaller because you carried an overspend in is shown in grey, not red. You went over once; being reminded of it in alarm colours every day for a month is not useful. Red is kept for money leaving the account uncovered right now.
The Weekly and Annual tabs leave it out, and their footnote says so. Weekly is a pacing view, your monthly amount divided by 4.33. Annual is your monthly amount times 12. Neither is a period the carry is defined over, and folding a chain that can run two years into a single annual total would make both numbers harder to trust.
