The math has a job.
Bills, paydays, balances, settlements, savings and debt use deterministic rules and integer money arithmetic.
A little less effort.
A lot more context.
Useful suggestions begin with your choices. Clear explanations begin with your records. You stay in charge of both.
A suggestion is a suggestion.
Category ranking can learn locally, but confidence controls whether it prefills, asks, or stays silent.
You confirm the change.
Suggestions, scenarios, searches and receipt matches never mutate financial data before an explicit action.
Good suggestions start with good evidence.
Budget Flow uses the clearest available evidence first. It never asks a learned model to override a rule you created.
Explicit ruleYour merchant rule wins.
“Sora Kitchen” → Dining outLocal modelHigh-confidence learning may prefill.
Hashed merchant features, an amount bucket, and the time of dayHistoryLocal aggregates offer a fallback.
Past confirmed choices, never cloud profilesAbstainToo little evidence means no guess.
An empty category is more honest than a bad answerConfidence changes the response.
Prediction is assistance, not authority. Budget Flow changes its behaviour depending on how much evidence the local model actually has.
Prefill, visibly.
The suggested category appears in the normal editable control. You can change it before saving.
Ask for acceptance.
The suggestion is offered, but it is not applied until you choose it.
Stay out of the way.
No inference is shown. Budget Flow falls back to history or leaves the field open.
Known commitments. Possible outcomes.
The scheduled path
Paydays, bills, subscriptions, debt commitments and other confirmed events move the line on their real dates.
- Only this layer may state a shortfall as fact.
- Unpaid obligations remain visible for the selected cycle.
- Card refunds reduce card debt instead of pretending to add cash.
The simulated range
Budget Flow learns how often flexible spending days happen and what a typical spend day costs, then runs bounded, seeded simulations.
- Results are labelled likely, possible, unlikely, none, or unknown.
- Unusual purchases cannot define the entire future.
- Too little history produces “unknown”, not invented certainty.
Can I add $200 to my emergency fund?
Yes, with room left.$238estimated flexible money after the change
✓Rent remains fully funded
✓Debt minimum remains locked
✓No records changed
Ask a financial question without changing your plan.
What-if calculations use exact integer money. Locked amounts are never reduced to make an answer look better. The scenario stays read-only until you explicitly review and apply an adjustment.
The right receipt belongs with the right purchase.
Strong unique match
A receipt attaches automatically only when one transaction is a sufficiently strong, unique candidate.
Checksum protection
The same receipt cannot be attached twice. Its bytes are tracked by checksum, not filename guesswork.
Exact OCR reconciliation
Item suggestions are offered only when their integer totals reconcile exactly. Text recognition runs on the device — Apple Vision on iPhone, iPad and Mac, ML Kit on Android — and no receipt image is uploaded. The browser app can attach a receipt but cannot read one.
Sometimes, you want to talk it through.
Everything above this line
The parser, the category model, the confidence ladder, the forecast and every figure in the app are computed here and make no network request.
- Ask Budget Flow ships turned off.
- With it off, questions are answered on the device from your own figures, or not at all.
- Nothing is sent because you opened a screen; only because you asked.
Words for figures already worked out
Turn it on in Settings and a question this device cannot answer alone goes to Budget Flow’s own hosted service, which asks Google’s Gemini model for the wording.
- What travels: your question, a page of the totals it needs — amounts, dates and a currency — the part of Budget Flow’s own documentation the question is about, and the last few turns of the conversation. Saved names become numbered placeholders and pattern identifiers are removed before any of it leaves the device.
- What does not: your transaction list, account numbers, notes and receipts.
- The arithmetic is done before anything is sent, and an answer quoting a figure the device did not supply is discarded rather than shown.
- Because the question travels as written, keep names and account numbers out of it.