Planning
Budget
Envelope budgeting: give every pound a job, watch real spending leave each envelope, and let leftovers roll forward.
Budget groups
Create budget groups for how you actually spend — food, travel, entertainment — and for regular bills like rent, utilities and subscriptions. A group can carry a schedule (weekly, monthly or annual, with a payment day) so repeating payments land in monthly cash flow and on the month timeline at the right time, and can be tied to an inflation category (based on UK CPI components) so long-range projections grow it at a realistic rate rather than a single flat figure.
Envelope budgeting — give every pound a job
The Budget page is a zero-based ("envelope") budget: you assign the cash you actually hold to categories until there's nothing left to assign. Each category shows three numbers:
- Assigned — money you put into the envelope this period
- Activity — what actually left it, live from your categorised transactions
- Available — assigned plus carryover minus activity: what's left to spend
Ready to Assign is the cash in your current accounts that isn't already sitting in an envelope — the goal is to drive it to £0, so every pound has a job. It's calculated from your real account balances at the start of the period, not from income, so the budget works before any income is categorised.
Ready to Assign
£267.95
Left to assign from your current accounts
| Group | Assigned | Activity | Available |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials(2) | £550.00 | £513.65 | £67.55 |
Food | ✓ funded | £382.452 txns | £67.55 |
Travel | £131.201 txn | £0.00 | |
| Lifestyle(1) | £0.00 | £45.50 | £14.50 |
Entertainment | £45.501 txn | £14.50incl. £60.00 rolled over | |
| Sinking funds(1) | £150.00 | £0.00 | £300.00 |
Car maintenance | ✓ funded | £0.00 | £300.00incl. £150.00 rolled over |
This is the real Budget screen layout running the app’s actual envelope engine. Click an Assigned amount to edit it, click “needs £20” to fund a target, or “cover” on the overspent Travel row — here the money comes from your fullest envelope; in the app a Move-money dialog lets you choose the source. Each row also carries actions to set targets, move money, edit and reorder groups, omitted here.
Carryover, overspending and moving money
A category's leftover Available rolls into the next period, so under-spending Food this month means a fuller Food envelope next month.
Overspending doesn't drag a category into the negative: the envelope resets to £0 and the row shows how much it was overspent. The cash has already left your accounts, so the shortfall surfaces as a lower Ready to Assign instead. To cover it — or simply to reallocate — use Move money, which shifts an amount from one category's Available into another without changing Ready to Assign.
The budget begins at your budget start date (set in Settings). Transactions before it are ignored by the rollover, so years of imported history can't seed phantom carryover or overspending.
Funding targets and auto-assign
Give a category a target and the assign workflow tells you what it needs each month:
- Monthly — assign a set amount every month
- Weekly — a per-week amount, converted to its monthly equivalent
- Balance — keep a set amount available, topping up whatever's been spent
- Balance by date — reach an amount by a deadline, spreading the remaining gap evenly over the months left
Each row shows funded or underfunded with the amount still needed. Auto-assign targets funds every underfunded target in order until Ready to Assign runs out — one click to do the routine assigning, leaving you the judgement calls.
Credit card payment envelopes
When you add a credit card, Zukunft creates a tied "Credit Card Payment" group automatically. Its activity is the new charges on that card this period, so the envelope shows whether you've set aside enough cash to pay off what you've put on the card.
Charges you've already budgeted in another category are excluded — they're funded from that category's envelope, so counting them here too would double-fund them.
Sinking funds
Mark a group as a sinking fund for large, irregular costs — car repairs, annual insurance, Christmas. Its Available balance accumulates month after month toward the eventual bill, and the dashboard treats that money as committed rather than free surplus, so insights about spare cash don't tempt you to raid the boiler fund. Pair a sinking fund with a balance-by-date target and the budget tells you exactly what to put aside each month.
Planned vs actual on the dashboard
Activity lands in each envelope automatically from your categorised transactions (or manual entry), and the dashboard summarises the month as planned-against-actual per group — each bar fills as you spend and turns red once a group goes over, so overspends read at a glance.