How it works — Finance Planner

Three steps to a year you can read

1. Put the year in (About 15 minutes) — Income by person and month — a salary is one figure that fills the year — then the recurring costs that make a normal month, and the one-offs you already know about. Nothing to connect, nothing to import.

2. Say what you meant to spend (About 5 minutes) — Budgets by month or by year, over all spending, one category, or one project — the big pieces of work you group your one-off entries into. Spending reaches a budget by description, or because you charged it there on purpose.

3. Read where it lands — and keep it true (Instant, then a minute a month) — The dashboard shows the tightest month and whether the balance holds your buffer. Once a month you record what the bank actually said, and the projection rolls on from that instead of drifting.

The rules the arithmetic follows

Baseline net = income + recurring outgoings. Outgoings are stored negative, so a month that nets nothing reads as nothing rather than as a subtraction you have to do yourself.

Monthly net = baseline net − one-offs − invested − debt repaid. Everything that leaves the balance leaves it once, in the order money actually moves.

Spending counts when it is planned or done, and committed or likely. A skipped entry never counts, and a maybe is deliberately left out — parking a possible expense should not make the plan look worse than the plan is.

A budget is a yardstick, not a forecast input. Budgeting 15,000 for a kitchen and itemising 3,000 of it leaves the projection showing 3,000. Budgets never touch the savings projection.

Net worth = savings + investments + asset value − everything owed. Read from today’s balances, with each asset compounding at its own rate and every debt repaid at its own — never one blended rate over the lot.