What ClearBudget does

Most budgeting software is retrospective. ClearBudget looks forward instead.

The forecast has a page of its own, from Safe to Spend Today to what would fix a month that cannot hold; everything around it follows.

Will the month survive?

Safe to Spend Today, the next two months walked day by day and what each month needs to hold, with the mid-month dip named before payday arrives.

Then what would fix a month that cannot hold: the Recommendations view with its try-it-on previews, plus money held back for a bill that has not arrived yet.

Explore the forecast

Around the forecast

Credit card pressure

Per-card utilisation, interest and a six-month balance projection, colour-coded by available headroom. Credit-limit changes can be scheduled ahead so every projection honours them.

Bill and income timing

Per-month skips, amount and due-day overrides, paid and received flags and one-off entries.

Something that stops is ended, never erased: bills and income carry a final month, so the months they really ran in keep them. A rent increase changes a bill's amount from one month onward without rewriting what earlier months cost.

A red tick marks a payment or arrival day fixed in the real world; Recommendations never proposes moving one.

Tables you can order

Click a column heading to order a table by it and click it again to reverse; an arrow says which column the rows are in and which way it runs.

Bills, income, the commitments you are setting money aside for and the archived year all read this way, each heading ordering by exactly what its column shows.

Self-maintaining balance

Set your bank balance once. Dated bills and income are applied to it at midnight on their day and ticked off automatically; delete an applied item and the amount is handed back. Each update is all or nothing: an interrupted one leaves no bill ticked off without being taken from the balance.

A Graph view

The month as a picture, on a page of its own: the bank balance day by day or every card on one chart, drawn as bars or a line.

Each day's bar is judged against the overdraft you actually have: calm at or above zero, amber inside your facility, red only where a payment would bounce.

Where money is being set aside, the floor is drawn across the month and a day in credit that falls below it is dimmed, so a day that is already spoken for stops reading as free.

Shareable reports

Export the month as one self-contained web page; export a whole range of months as a folder, an index whose table adds up and every row opening that month's own day-by-day page.

Nothing is fetched from anywhere, so a report can be emailed or opened offline from a stick.

Several budgets, one sign-in

Keep more than one budget under one account: a household beside a business, this year beside a plan for next.

Each budget is its own separate database. Switching changes nothing in either one and the budget you already had keeps the file it always used.

Back up everything at once

The admin account can put every account and every budget in a single zip, restorable in full onto a rebuilt machine.

A restore is checked in a staging area first, every database read page by page, so a damaged or malformed backup changes nothing. A budget of an account the backup does not hold is moved to a quarantine folder rather than deleted, so a new account given that name starts empty. The zip is not encrypted; the app says so before writing one.

Private by design

Per-user isolated databases behind a bcrypt sign-in. No cloud, no account servers; the only network request the app ever makes is a daily check of the project's GitHub releases for a newer version, carrying nothing about you.

Remember my password keeps it in the operating system's own credential store, never in a plain file. One click saves the whole budget to a file you choose; the app remembers where, separately for every account.

Light and dark

One button switches the whole application, sign-in screen included. The choice is remembered and the graphs follow, with a palette chosen to stay readable on each background.

Usable without a mouse

An explicit keyboard path through every screen and dialog: Tab and the arrows step the same ring, the view buttons are walked one at a time, long pages scroll from the keyboard and you can always see where you are: a ring round a control; in a table, the highlighted row.

25 currencies

Choose your currency once and every figure follows it. Defaults to GBP.

Installs without touching your data

A native package per platform: a per-user Windows setup needing no administrator rights, a macOS disk image and a Linux Flatpak.

Install, upgrade, repair and uninstall deal in program files only, so your budgets, accounts and saved theme survive all of them.

Seven views, one question

Each view is a different angle on the same question: whether this month holds together and whether the ones after it do. Each one's button carries a picture rather than a name, sitting in the navigation tray beside the other controls and naming itself on hover, even while another program has the focus.

Monthly Budget

Bills and income for the month, with a balance that keeps itself up to date as dated items fall due, the projected month-end figure for future months and a mid-month overdraft warning. Either table can be ordered by any of its columns.

Solvency

Two pages, each a whole answer rather than half of one long scroll. The bank page is built only from money you have entered: your account position, then the next two months walked day by day, each one priced and dated rather than merely flagged, starting with how much it goes overdrawn by and on which day. The Safe to Spend page adds the one assumption worth making, that the months ahead resemble this one, states it in words and shows what follows from it.

Credit Cards

One panel per card with live pro-rated balances and a six-month projection strip across every card.

Reserves

What is being held back for a bill that has not arrived yet: an annual premium, an MOT, Christmas. Each one accrues across the months before it lands, so the money it needs stops being counted as spendable.

Graph

The viewed month as a chart: the bank balance day by day or every card on one chart, switched on the page itself, with the HTML exports beside it.

Recommendations

What would make the months ahead survivable: measured retimings, the extra income each month still needs and a try-it-on preview of any change before you make it anywhere real.