Answers about the number, your accounts and your money

Because something in the calculation moved. Safe to Spend recomputes continuously from your available cash, protected money, and the days left in your cycle — so a deposit, a bill being protected, a purchase posting, or simply a new day can all shift it.

Open the "Why did this change?" log in the app for an itemised delta, for example a move from $72 to $38:

• +$1,480 paycheck deposited
• −$220 electric bill protected
• −$63.24 purchases
• +$50 unused from your previous spending plan

If a line in that log looks wrong, you can correct the underlying transaction and the number recalculates.

Because savings are never automatically counted as available. $800 in checking plus $5,000 in savings is not $5,800 of Safe to Spend — it is $800 of cash and $5,000 you decided to keep for something else.

You control this. Each goal has a protected flag, and each account has an include-in-DollarSafe setting. Unprotect a goal and that money re-enters the pool; the app will not make that decision for you, and it will not quietly spend it either.

This is the Golden Rule: DollarSafe never counts money that does not exist yet as spendable. Expected income appears on the planning screen — "Paycheck $1,480 — expected Aug 28" — so you can see it coming, but it is excluded from available cash until it is deposited.

Example: $1,400 in checking with $1,500 arriving Friday means today's calculation uses $1,400. On Friday, once the deposit lands, the number moves.

Days remaining is derived from the end of your budget cycle, not a fixed 30. Spendable money is divided by the days left, so the same pool naturally yields a larger daily amount as the cycle shortens.

Cycles can be monthly (for example Sep 1 to Sep 30), paycheck-to-paycheck (Aug 28 to Sep 11), or a custom reset date. The engine is identical for all three.

DollarSafe never displays a negative allowance. When the maths yields a negative result, the headline shows $0.00 and the line underneath explains the gap — for example "You're $37 short of covering your current plan."

That is the Shortfall state. It tells you what is short and why, so you can decide what to adjust: a bill date, a savings contribution, or an account floor.

No. If today was $50 and you spent $70, the engine records −$20 and lowers future discretionary amounts to absorb it. Nothing is broken or reset.

Overspend draws in a fixed order: today's allowance, then the remaining discretionary money in the cycle, then an optional buffer if you set one up. Only after those are exhausted does the app warn that protected money is at risk — it never silently raids protected savings.

Because it isn't. A $500 transfer from checking to savings is not an expense, and DollarSafe does not treat it as one. Your total cash is unchanged; where it sits changed.

A transfer can still change Safe to Spend indirectly — moving cash into a protected savings goal, or below an account minimum, reduces what is available. If a transfer was misread as spending, re-classify it on the Transactions screen.

Pending transactions are counted conservatively — they reduce Safe to Spend right away, because the money is realistically gone.

When the transaction posts, the pending entry is replaced, not added again. You will not see the same purchase counted twice, and the final posted amount is what sticks even if it differs from the pending hold.

Because the purchases on that card were already counted when you made them. Counting the payment as well would deduct the same money twice.

A card payment moves money to settle spending that already hit your plan. Card bills can still be protected as bills, so the cash needed to pay them is set aside ahead of time.

A refund restores money only once it has posted. A pending refund is not available cash, so it does not raise Safe to Spend yet — this is the Golden Rule again: money that has not arrived is not spendable.

Once the credit posts, it returns to available cash and the number recalculates on the next refresh.

Yes. Everything the engine reads is correctable by you:

• Wrong category or wrong bill match
• A duplicate transaction
• A transfer misread as spending
• A misclassified deposit
• Whether a transaction is protected
• Whether an account participates in Safe to Spend at all

Each transaction row shows merchant, amount, date, account, category, pending or posted status, and whether it affected Safe to Spend.

Open Settings → Accounts, choose the account, and set its minimum balance (its floor). The floor is money the app will never treat as spendable.

Example: $1,200 in checking with a $500 floor leaves $700 available to the calculation. Each account also has an include-in-DollarSafe flag and a role (checking, savings, bill account, credit card, cash), so you decide exactly what counts.

It surfaces the gap rather than hiding it. If your bills account needs $1,800 and holds $1,500, the app shows "Bills account needs $300" and recommends topping it up before discretionary spending, extra savings, or additional debt payments.

It is a recommendation with a clear reason — the app will not move money for you.

Manual mode: you enter balances, transactions, bills, income, savings and debts yourself. Nothing is linked to a bank.

Connected mode: balances, transactions and deposits sync automatically. You still choose which accounts participate, and detected income is used for forecasting only — it never raises Safe to Spend before it is deposited.

The calculation engine is exactly the same in both modes. Only the data entry differs.

No. DollarSafe is not an envelope-category budgeting app, and the core product works with zero category budgeting.

Optional categories — Food, Gas, Entertainment, Shopping, Kids, Personal — exist for information only. They never gate the calculation and you can ignore them entirely.

Never. It gives recommendations and shows consequences instead of prohibitions: "Spend $100 today → estimated Safe Tomorrow: $31/day" rather than "don't spend $100."

You can also test decisions before you commit with "Can I buy this?" and scenario planning. Nothing changes until you confirm it.

Subscription controls live in Settings → Subscription inside the app. Billing is not live yet, so there is currently nothing to cancel — no card is captured anywhere on this site or in the app.

TODO The exact cancellation flow, refund handling and end-of-term behaviour will be documented here once payments are connected. If you need help in the meantime, contact support.

TODO Retention and export behaviour after a lapsed subscription is not finalised and is not documented here yet. We would rather say "undecided" than promise something we have not built.

See the draft privacy notice for what data the app handles today.