Debt & TransfersiMoney moving between accounts -- loan and credit card payments, transfers, balance adjustments -- rather than real income or spending. Net Cash Flow = Net Income + this.
Rows where the sign looks backwards for their type — Income should be positive (money in), Expense should be negative (money out). Review each one and correct if needed.
Add each account you track — checking, savings, credit cards, mortgage, retirement, etc. Setting an Interest Rate automatically estimates minimum monthly payments for your debt payoff plan.
Account
Type
Institution
Starting Balance
Balance
Interest Rate
Min Payment
Share Accounts
Give someone outside your household a private, read-only link to specific accounts' balance and recent activity — no login required, and nothing else in Budget Pilot is visible through it. Revoke a link at any time.
One account's activity with a running balance, newest first — defaults to your primary account. Click Edit to change anything; this view is read-only otherwise.
Connect your accounts directly and new transactions will flow in on their own — no more copy/paste. Manual CSV import is still here for anyone who prefers it.
Add transactions
Paste transactions or upload a CSV file for any account.
Connected banks
Not connected yet.
Permanently erases transactions saved for this household. Accounts, budgets, and bills are preserved.
Clear all transaction data
This permanently deletes every transaction saved for this household — there is no undo and no backup. Accounts, budgets, and bills are preserved.
Import transactions
Format: Category,Month,Amount,Person or include custom Account, Date (YYYY-MM-DD), and Description columns. Positive amounts represent money in, negative amounts represent money out.
This doesn't look like Budget Pilot's own format — match the columns from your file, then confirm:
Preview — confirm the signs look right before continuing:
Transactions synced from a connected bank land here first -- approve each one (optionally fixing the category or person first) to add it to your real transaction table, or reject it to discard it. Nothing here affects your reports until you approve it.
When a transaction's description contains the text below (and its amount fits any range you set), it's coded to that category automatically during review -- checked in priority order, highest first, and the first match wins. Person is optional and set the same way, for when a description reliably points to who made the purchase. Used when reviewing newly-synced transactions; doesn't change anything already in your table.
Add your own categories under one of the app's existing groups -- new ones show up everywhere immediately (transactions, budgets, bills, autocoding rules). A category can be renamed or deleted only while it's unused; once anything is coded to it, unchecking Active is the only way to retire it, so nothing already coded to it is ever touched.
Upload a real statement from your bank or card issuer (CSV or Excel) and compare it against what's saved here, month by month — spot duplicates, missing transactions, or dates that landed wrong, and fix them without leaving the app.
1 · Choose a statement
Accepts .csv, .xls, or .xlsx exports.
2 · Match the columns
Preview — confirm the signs look right before continuing:
Subtotals by group and category, using the selected number column above. If your data doesn't include a Group column, it's guessed from Category using your category list.
By family member (optional)
Add a "Person" column to any rows you want attributed to a family member — leave it blank on shared/household rows. Works for income or spending. Uses the selected number column above.
Budget progressiBar color shows how a category's actual spending compares to its planned amount: green is 85% or under, gold is over 85%, red is over 100% (over budget).
Estimate one paycheck's take-home pay from a gross salary — pure client-side math, nothing saved until you click Apply. Federal tax uses a simplified bracket estimate, not your real withholding — treat this as a planning estimate, not tax advice.
Set an interest rate and minimum payment for each debt in "Your accounts" above, then pick a strategy and however much extra you can put toward debt each month.
Total Debt
$0
Debt-Free By
—
Total Interest (This Plan)iTotal interest you'll pay across all these debts under your selected strategy and extra payment amount, from today until everything's paid off.
Extra Payment Saves YouiInterest and time saved by paying that extra amount each month, compared to paying only the minimums.
Bills for this household — recurring or one-time, expenses or expected income — and the selected month's totals. A bill is matched once a real transaction lines up with its account, category, and amount — see it linked below once that's happened.
Add this link in Google Calendar via Settings → Add calendar → From URL (Apple/Outlook Calendar have an equivalent "subscribe by URL" option). It updates automatically whenever your bills change, but calendar apps only check for updates every several hours — not instantly.
Shared this link with someone who shouldn't see it anymore (an ex-partner, a former roommate)? Regenerate replaces it with a brand-new link and immediately breaks the old one.
Forward a bill or receipt email here (or set up a Gmail filter to do it automatically) and it'll show up in your Review Queue for one-click confirmation — no login needed on the sending side, and nothing else about your account is exposed by this address.
Projects an account's balance forward by adding every upcoming bill and expected income that hasn't happened yet. Already-matched bills are skipped — they're already reflected in the current balance.
The same bill/income activity as Cash Flow Projection, bucketed by month so you can see further out — good for spotting a dip several months away rather than just the next couple of weeks.
Month
Starting balance
Bills/income in
Bills out
Net
Committed ending
Realistic ending
Reports
Reporting HQ
Every report your CPA, your bank, or the IRS could ask for — all in one place.
Used for the by-person breakdown above — anyone can be listed, member or not. Derived from names already used on transactions.
Notifications
In-app and email alerts for the whole household. Leave a field blank or unchecked to turn it off. Per-account low-balance and near-credit-limit alerts are set on the Accounts tab.
Hi, I'm Sterling Margin, the Budget Pilot AI Assistant. Ask me how to do something in the app, or ask about your own spending this month — for example, "how do I set up autocoding rules" or "am I over budget on groceries?"
Sterling Margin is a fictional AI character, not a licensed tax or financial professional.
Log a loan payment
Estimated from this account's current balance and interest rate. If your lender's statement shows the real split, edit the numbers below before saving. Recording which account paid it keeps that account's own balance accurate too, instead of relying on your bank sync to quietly catch up later.
Adjust balance
Current balance: . Enter the correct balance and we'll record a one-sided adjustment for the difference — use this for a reconciliation correction, not a real transfer.
Set up recurring bill
New account share
Choose which accounts this link can see. The person you send it to doesn't need a Budget Pilot login.
Accounts
Add transaction
Group and Type are set automatically from the category you pick, the same way importing does.
Edit transaction
Group and Type are set automatically from each line's category, the same way importing does. Person and Description apply to the whole transaction, even when split.
Every transaction that adds up to the number you clicked.
Date
Description
Category
Account
Amount
Total
Create autocoding rule
Future transactions whose description contains this text -- and whose amount fits the range below, if set -- will be coded to this category automatically during review.
Set up this connection
Map each account Plaid found to one you already track, or create a new one. This only needs to be done once for this connection.
What to bring in
Manage connections
Re-run account mapping for any connection -- useful for one made before this screen existed, or one where a new account showed up at the bank since you last mapped it.
Connect a real bank account?
You're about to link a real financial institution, not a test account — Budget Pilot will start pulling in its actual transaction history.
Delete this connection?
Deletes the connection to this bank — this can't be undone. You'd need to reconnect it from scratch, using one of your plan's connection slots, to bring it back.
Are you sure?
You're connected
Your bank is linked, but two more steps get transactions actually showing up:
Click Sync now to pull in transactions.
New transactions land in the Review queue first, not Overview directly — that's where you confirm or fix their categories before they count anywhere else.
Edit 0transactions
Only fields you change here are applied — leave anything as "Don't change" to keep each transaction's existing value.
What "CPA Built" means here
Budget Pilot is designed by a licensed CPA. That shows up as specific things in the product, not just a label:
A category taxonomy built around real accounting groups, not generic budget-app buckets.
Real financial statements — Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement — not just a spending summary.
A Tax Summary that groups your transactions into the categories a CPA or tax preparer actually needs.
Debt payments correctly split into interest (a real expense) versus principal (a transfer), so reports don't overstate your spending.
Debt payoff projections built on real interest math against your actual balance and rate, not a rough guess.
One-click "Share with CPA" — send real reports straight to your accountant, no manual re-entry.
This reflects the judgment behind how the app is built — it's not tax or accounting advice, and doesn't replace your CPA's own review.
Share with CPA
Bundles all 5 reports into one Excel file for the year(s) you pick, and gives you a secure link -- no one needs a Budget Pilot account to open it. Enter a CPA email below and we'll email them the link directly; leave it blank to just get a link to paste into your own email.
Recent shares
Find a CPA
A short list of tax and accounting firms familiar with Budget Pilot. "Request intro" opens Share with CPA, pre-addressed to whoever you pick.
Budget Pilot