Help Center

Getting started

Budget Pilot is organized into tabs across the top: Overview, Accounts & Data, Transactions, Budget & Debt, Bills, Reports, and Household. A handful of tabs have their own row of sub-tabs underneath (for example, Accounts & Data splits into Accounts / Import & data / Review queue / Autocoding rules).

The fastest path to a working dashboard:

1. Sign in with Google or an email/password account.
2. Go to Accounts & Data → Accounts and add each account you track — checking, savings, credit cards, a mortgage, retirement, etc.
3. Go to Accounts & Data → Import & data and either paste transactions, upload a CSV, or try "Preview sample budget data" to see the app populated before committing your own data.
4. Set up Accounts & Data → Autocoding rules — match a description pattern to a category once, and every future import categorizes itself.
5. Add your Budget & Debt → Budget — a planned amount per category is what unlocks forward-looking cash flow projections, not just a running total.
6. Everything else — Reports, Debt Payoff, the Overview dashboard — fills in automatically from there.

Every panel in the app has a small ? badge in its top-right corner that opens this Help Center scrolled straight to the matching section — that's usually the fastest way back here.

Clickable numbers

Most bold amounts you see across reports and the dashboard — a category total, a group subtotal, Net Income, Net Worth — can be clicked to open the exact transactions that add up to it. From that same window, an Edit button next to any transaction lets you fix a miscoded one on the spot without hunting for it in the full table.

Pricing & Plans

Budget Pilot has three plans, priced around how much of the app your household needs — more accounts, more automation, and a deeper report suite as you move up. See the full breakdown, including annual pricing, on the Pricing page.

Navigator — $4.99/mo

For getting your household's basics under control: 3 connected bank accounts, core budgeting, household sharing and notifications, the Balance Sheet & Income Statement, Avalanche-strategy debt payoff, up to 25 autocoding rules, and Sterling AI at 10 questions a day.

Aviator — $9.99/mo (most popular)

Everything in Navigator, plus 8 connected bank accounts, the full report suite (Cash Flow, Monthly Detail, Vendor, Tax Summary), cash-flow & long-term projections, both debt payoff strategies, up to 50 autocoding rules, custom categories, a weekly email summary, email bill & receipt forwarding, and Sterling AI at 20 questions a day.

Commander — $19.99/mo

Everything in Aviator, plus unlimited bank connections and investment accounts, the CPA Marketplace (Find a CPA, Share with CPA), unlimited autocoding rules, unlimited Sterling AI, and the ability to share specific accounts outside your household.

Install Budget Pilot on Your Phone or Computer

Budget Pilot can be installed like a native app — its own icon, its own window, no browser address bar. The steps are different on every platform, so here's each one on its own.

iPhone & iPad

This only works from Safari — Chrome and other iOS browsers can't create the full-screen install.

1. Open trybudgetpilot.com in Safari and sign in.
2. Tap the Share icon (the square with an arrow pointing up) in the toolbar.
3. Scroll down the share sheet and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Confirm the name and tap Add in the top-right corner.

Budget Pilot now has its own icon on your Home Screen and opens full-screen, without Safari's address bar.

Android

1. Open trybudgetpilot.com in Chrome and sign in.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu in the top-right corner.
3. Tap Install app (some versions of Chrome show Add to Home screen instead).
4. Confirm by tapping Install.

Budget Pilot is added to your home screen and app drawer, and opens in its own window separate from Chrome.

Windows

1. Open trybudgetpilot.com in Chrome or Edge and sign in.
2. Look for an install icon (a small monitor with a down arrow) at the right edge of the address bar and click it — or open the ⋮ (Chrome) or … (Edge) menu and choose Install Budget Pilot… (in Edge, under Apps).
3. Click Install in the confirmation prompt.

Budget Pilot opens in its own window and gets a shortcut on your desktop, Start Menu, and taskbar — just like any other installed app. On a Mac, the same steps in Chrome or Edge add it to the Dock instead.

Overview & Net Worth

The Overview tab opens with your Total Household Net Worth — Assets minus Liabilities, added up across every account you track — followed by a Net Worth Over Time chart plotting that same figure back through your full transaction history.

Reading the chart

The green area is your total Assets, the red area your total Liabilities (already stored as a negative number, so nothing needs to be flipped to show it below the zero line), and the bold blue line running between them is Net Worth. The gap between the green and red areas is Net Worth — Assets minus Liabilities, drawn as a shape instead of just a number.

Both the hero figure and the chart are computed the same way as the Balance Sheet report — starting balance plus every transaction through that point in time — so they always match. Neither is drillable to individual transactions the way most other numbers in the app are, since a big part of the figure is each account's starting balance rather than transaction history alone.

Your Accounts

This is the list of every account you track: cash on hand, checking, savings, credit cards, a mortgage, loans, retirement, investments, property, or vehicles. Each account has a Starting Balance — its balance on the day before your very first imported transaction for that account — and everything after that is calculated automatically from your transaction history, so the Balance column always reflects reality without you having to update it by hand.

The Type column is a dropdown you can change any time — it only ever offers types on the same side of the balance sheet an account is already on (an asset stays an asset), so re-typing an account (e.g. moving a "Cash" account that was set up as "Other" into the proper Cash type) can't accidentally also flip it into a liability.

Interest rate & minimum payment

For any debt account (credit card, mortgage, loan, car loan), setting an Interest Rate lets Budget Pilot estimate a minimum monthly payment and feeds the Debt Payoff plan's projections. These fields are optional but make the Debt Payoff tab meaningfully more accurate.

Adjust balance

If your account's calculated balance ever drifts from your real bank balance (a missed transaction, a bank fee you never recorded), use Adjust balance to post a one-time correcting entry rather than editing the starting balance — that keeps your transaction history intact and honest.

Primary spending account

Mark one checking or savings account as your household's primary spending account using the Set as primary button. It's used two ways: it's the account Cash Flow Projection and Long-Term Projection default to when you first open them, and it's the only account where the Realistic projection (see Cash Flow & Long-Term Projection below) adds your budget on top of your bills — since your budget isn't tied to any one account, showing it on every checking account at once would count the same spending more than once.

Check Register

A traditional, one-account-at-a-time transaction list with a running balance — closer to a paper checkbook register than the all-accounts Transactions table. Pick any account from the dropdown (grouped the same Assets/Liabilities way as everywhere else) to see just its activity, oldest to newest, with the balance after each line.

Use the search box to narrow the list to a specific description, category, or person within that account. Click Edit on any row to open the same edit window used everywhere else in the app — there's no separate inline-editing here, so a split transaction, its category, and its account all behave exactly as they would from the Transactions table.

Import & Data

There are three ways to get transactions into Budget Pilot today: paste them, upload a CSV file, or preview built-in sample data. Click Import transactions to open the import window.

Simple format

Four columns: Category, Month, Amount, Person. Every row in a simple-format import applies to whichever single account you pick from the dropdown before importing. Amounts are signed — positive for money in, negative for money out — matching how your bank statement already shows things.

Rich format

If you're bringing in a larger export, you can include an Account column (each row can belong to a different account, matched by name to an account you've already created) and a Date column instead of Month for exact day-level dates.

What happens automatically on import

• Group and Type are always re-derived from Category — never trusted from your file — so a stale or mistyped Group can't silently produce the wrong Type.
• A payment on a debt account (credit card, mortgage, loan) that looks like a principal payment is automatically reclassified as a Transfer instead of an Expense, so only the account's real Interest Expense entries count as a cost. This keeps your Income Statement from overstating spending on a debt you're simply paying down.
• Zero-amount rows are skipped automatically.
• Rows with an unrecognized date, or an Account name that doesn't match an existing account, are skipped and listed out after the import so you can fix and re-import just those.

Clearing data

"Clear all household transaction data" permanently deletes every transaction for your household. Because that's irreversible, you have to type DELETE to confirm — there's no accidental single-click way to wipe your data.

Bank Sync (Plaid)

Connect a bank directly through Plaid so transactions, balances, and (for debt accounts) credit limits and interest rates flow in on their own — no more pasting or uploading by hand. Connecting a bank walks you through:

1. Linking your bank through Plaid's own secure sign-in window — Budget Pilot never sees or stores your bank login credentials.
2. Mapping accounts — matching each account Plaid finds at your bank to an account you already track in Budget Pilot (or creating a new one), so synced transactions land in the right place rather than duplicating history you've already entered by hand.
3. Choosing what to bring in — only new transactions from today forward, or also pulling in historical transactions Plaid has on file.

Once connected, a scheduled sync runs automatically every few hours — use Sync now if you don't want to wait for it. New transactions go through the same categorization logic as Autocoding Rules below before landing in Review Queue, never straight into your real transaction table.

Balances, credit limits & interest rates

Plaid's own reported balance, credit limit, and interest rate show up alongside your account's own numbers on Your Accounts whenever they differ — as a Reconcile or Use this action you click deliberately. Nothing from Plaid silently overwrites a number you've entered yourself.

Use Manage connections to re-run the account-mapping screen for a connection you've already made — useful if a new account shows up at your bank later, or if you want to change which accounts a connection syncs into.

Review Queue

Every transaction synced from a connected bank lands here first — never straight into your real transaction table. Each row shows a suggested category (and, if a rule set one, a suggested person) along with where that suggestion came from:

• Matched a rule — one of your Autocoding Rules applied.
• From your bank's category — no rule matched, so Budget Pilot fell back to the category your bank itself reported.
• Needs review — nothing matched; pick a category yourself before approving.

You can edit the category or person on any row before approving it. Approve adds it to your real transaction table exactly as shown; Reject discards it permanently. Select multiple rows with the checkboxes to approve or reject a batch at once. Nothing here affects your reports, budgets, or balances until you approve it.

If a row looks like it might already be sitting in your transaction table by hand — same account, same month, amount within a dollar — a note appears under its description with a Link instead of adding button. That stamps this bank transaction's identity onto your existing entry instead of creating a second row for the same real-world payment (see Mortgage & Loan Payments for the most common case, Log Payment's cash-side entry). It's only ever a suggestion — nothing links automatically, so double-check it's really the same transaction before clicking it.

Autocoding Rules

Autocoding rules let you teach Budget Pilot to categorize transactions automatically based on their description — this is what powers automatic categorization for Bank Sync above, and it doubles as a fast way to document your own categorization habits today.

How a rule works

• Match text — a plain substring match against the transaction's description, not case-sensitive and not a regular expression. If the description contains this text anywhere, the rule can apply.
• Min / max amount — optional. Leave both blank to match any amount, or set a range so the same merchant name can mean different things depending on how much was spent.
• Category — what the transaction gets coded to when this rule matches.
• Person — optional. If a description reliably points to who made the purchase, the rule can fill that in too.
• Priority — when two rules could both match the same transaction, the highest-priority rule wins; ties go to whichever rule is older.

Creating a rule from a real transaction

Instead of building rules from scratch, open any transaction (click it in the Transactions table) and use Create autocoding rule from this transaction. It pre-fills the match text from that transaction's description and its exact amount as both the min and max — so it starts as a precise, one-off match you can widen into a real range.

Categories

Budget Pilot's built-in categories cover most households, but you can add your own — always under one of the existing groups (Housing, Food, Business & Taxes, and so on), since every report relies on that grouping to sort things correctly. A brand-new group isn't something you can create; only a category within one.

A new category shows up immediately everywhere a category can be picked — transactions, budgets, bills, and autocoding rules.

Renaming and deleting

While a category has never been used on anything, you can freely rename it, change which group it belongs to, or delete it outright. The moment it's coded onto even one transaction, budget, bill, or autocoding rule, those options disappear — renaming or deleting it at that point could orphan whatever already relies on the old name, so the only way to retire it is to uncheck Active.

Recording a Mortgage or Loan Payment

A mortgage or loan payment is really two different things bundled into one bank withdrawal: interest, a real cost that belongs on your Income Statement, and principal, which just moves money from your checking account toward a debt you already owe. Coding the whole payment as one lump expense overstates your spending every month, and it never actually pays the loan down inside Budget Pilot.

The two pieces, and the one sign that matters

• Mortgage Interest / Interest Expense — always negative, wherever it's recorded. It's a genuine cost, exactly like any other bill.
• Loan Principal Payment — negative when it's the real cash leaving checking, but positive on the loan account itself. Every account's balance is starting balance + every transaction, and a loan's starting balance is stored negative — so only a positive entry moves it back toward zero.

Method 1 — From your real bank transaction (recommended)

Your bank shows one withdrawal for the full payment, so start there. Open it from Browse the Table and use + Split into another line to break it into Mortgage Interest and Loan Principal Payment — both negative, summing back to the original withdrawal. Your lender's monthly statement has the exact split; an estimate is fine if you don't have it handy.

That split only covers the checking side. Separately, add a second transaction dated the same month directly on the loan account: category Loan Principal Payment, amount positive, for that same principal figure. No interest line belongs on the loan account in this method — the interest already landed as a real cost over on checking.

When you're editing a transaction that's already sitting on a loan account, Suggest interest/principal split estimates this same breakdown from the account's interest rate and current balance — check it against your real statement before saving, since it's an estimate, not your lender's actual figure.

Method 2 — Log Payment (writes both accounts for you)

If you'd rather not build the checking-side split by hand, use the Log Payment button on that account under Debt Payoff. Enter the total payment, a month, and which account paid it — Budget Pilot estimates the interest/principal split from the account's interest rate and writes all three lines for you.

On the loan account, the Loan Principal Payment line is posted for the gross payment amount, not just the principal — paired with the Interest Expense line right alongside it, the two net to exactly the true principal reduction (gross − interest = principal). That's different from Method 1, where the loan account gets only the plain principal figure with no interest line next to it. Either way the loan's balance ends up right; Log Payment's version just needs both lines read together to see it.

Quick reference

How to tell a month is coded wrong

• The loan's Balance on Your Accounts isn't dropping month to month even though you're making payments — check for a negative Loan Principal Payment sitting on the loan account.
• An Interest Expense/Mortgage Interest entry and a Loan Principal Payment for the same month show up on checking and again on the loan account under Method 1's convention (no interest line paired with it there) — interest should only be recorded once.
• A Loan Principal Payment on the loan account with no matching interest entry anywhere that month, and no Interest Expense line next to it on that same account either — likely means only half of a real payment ever got recorded.

Reconcile

Upload a real statement from your bank or card issuer — CSV or Excel — and compare it against what's already saved in Budget Pilot, month by month. This is the tool for catching duplicates, missing transactions, or a date that landed wrong, without leaving the app or reconstructing history by hand.

Column mapping

Budget Pilot guesses which column is Date, Description, Amount (or separate Debit/Credit columns), and Balance from your file's headers, but every guess is editable before you continue. A live preview shows the signed amount for a few rows, so you can confirm the sign convention matches your file before importing anything.

Reviewing a month

Each month shows either Matches (your statement and saved totals agree) or Review (something's different) — expand a Review month to see exactly what's driving it: transactions only on your statement, transactions only saved in Budget Pilot, or a transaction that appears on both with the sign flipped.

A flipped sign is presumed a refund, not an error

When the same transaction shows up with opposite signs on your statement and in Budget Pilot, the default assumption is that it's a genuine refund or reversal — real purchases get refunded often, especially in a larger household. Confirm accepts it as-is; Flip sign is there for the times it's an actual entry error, but it's the second choice, not the default.

Nothing is changed until you act on a specific difference — uploading a file and reviewing it doesn't touch your saved data by itself.

Browse the Table

The full, searchable, sortable list of every transaction in the selected date range. Use the All / Income / Expense / Transfer pills to focus on one type at a time, and click any column header to sort by it.

Editing a transaction

Click any row to open it. You can change the account, category, amount, person, or description, and delete the transaction entirely. If a transaction is split across multiple categories, all of its lines open together and must stay balanced to the original total — the last line auto-adjusts as you edit the others so you never have to do the subtraction yourself.

Splitting a transaction

Use + Split into another line inside the edit window to break one transaction across two or more categories — useful for a single store trip that covered both groceries and household items, for example.

Bulk editing

Select multiple rows with the checkboxes to change their Category, Account, or Person all at once. Any field you leave as "Don't change" keeps each transaction's existing value.

Adding a transaction manually

Use + Add transaction for a one-off entry without going through the import flow.

Category Breakdown

A visual breakdown of your selected date range, grouped by Category or by Group (use the dropdown to switch), and filterable to Income only or Expense only. Choose between a bar chart, pie chart, line chart, or a plain table view using the icons in the top-right of the panel.

Flagged Transactions

Catches rows where the sign looks backwards for their type — an Income row that's negative, or an Expense row that's positive. This is almost always a sign mistake from a manual entry or a CSV import, so it's worth reviewing and correcting each one you see here.

Group Summary

Subtotals by category group (Housing, Food, Transportation, etc.) for the selected date range — a quicker way to see where money is going at a higher level than the full category list.

Budget

Set a planned dollar amount per category for a given month under Set your budget, then check Budget progress to see actual spending compared against your plan for that same month. Copy to rest of year applies the current month's planned amounts to every remaining month in the year, so you don't have to re-enter a stable budget twelve times.

Bill-based suggestions

If a category has an active recurring bill, its budget row shows Your bill says $X/mo — Use this, converting whatever cadence the bill runs on (weekly, quarterly, annual, and so on) into a monthly-equivalent figure. Clicking it fills in that amount; it's a suggestion you act on, never something applied automatically.

Paycheck Calculator

Estimates one paycheck's take-home pay from a gross salary — pure client-side math, and nothing is saved until you click Apply. Federal tax uses a simplified bracket estimate rather than your actual withholding, so treat the result as a planning estimate, not a substitute for your real pay stub or tax advice.

Debt Payoff

Set an interest rate and minimum payment for each debt account under Your Accounts first — this plan is built directly from those numbers. Then choose a strategy:

• Avalanche — pays off the highest interest rate first. Saves the most money in total interest.
• Snowball — pays off the smallest balance first. Builds momentum with faster wins, even though it usually costs slightly more in total interest.

Add an extra per month amount to see how putting more toward debt each month moves up your debt-free date.

Log Payment

Each debt account has its own Log Payment button for recording a payment without importing it from your bank — see Mortgage & Loan Payments for exactly what it writes and when to reach for it instead of a regular import.

Bills Calendar

Track recurring bills (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual — including "every 2 weeks" or "every 3 months" style intervals) or one-time bills with a specific due date, and see them laid out on a calendar for the selected month. A bill can be an expense or expected income (like a paycheck) — pick any category when adding one. A recurring bill can also skip a set number of occurrences after a given date each year, for something like a school-year paycheck that pauses over the summer.

A bill is matched once a real transaction lines up with its account, category, and amount — shown as "Paid" or "Received." Use Rescan matches after adding a new bill or importing a batch of transactions, to check your existing history against it. Subscribe in Google Calendar gives you a link any calendar app can subscribe to, so your bills show up alongside everything else on your phone or desktop calendar.

Budget check

If a month's scheduled bills alone already exceed what you've budgeted for a category group — before any discretionary spending on top — a warning banner calls it out, with a link straight to that budget group. It's a heads-up, not an automatic fix: nothing about your budget changes unless you change it yourself.

Email Bill Forwarding

Forward a bill or receipt email to your household's own private address and Budget Pilot reads it automatically — a bill still coming due gets staged as a new bill for you to confirm; a receipt for something already charged either quietly confirms a transaction your bank sync already caught, or gets staged in the Review Queue if that account isn't connected through Bank Sync. Find your household's address under Bills → Set up email bill forwarding. It works with Gmail, Outlook, or any provider — the Gmail steps below are just the ones most people will use.

The quick way: forward one email by hand

Open any bill or receipt email and click Forward — no setup required. Paste in your Budget Pilot address and send. This is the fastest way to try it once, and a good way to confirm your address works before setting up automatic forwarding below.

Automatic forwarding in Gmail, part 1: verify your address

Gmail requires any address to be verified once before it can be used in automatic forwarding — this is a one-time setup per Gmail account, not something Budget Pilot adds on top.

1. In Gmail, click the gear icon → See all settings → the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
2. Click Add a forwarding address, paste in your Budget Pilot address, then Next → Proceed → OK.
3. Gmail sends a confirmation email to that address — but it has no inbox for you to check directly, so the next two steps retrieve it a different way.
4. Log into your Postmark account, open the inbound server you set up, and go to its Activity page. Switch to the Inbound feed, find the confirmation message from the Gmail team, and open it.
5. Click the verification link inside that message.

Automatic forwarding in Gmail, part 2: create a filter

A filter forwards only the mail that looks like a bill or receipt, rather than everything in your inbox.

1. In Gmail's search bar, click the small sliders icon on the right (or go to Settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses → Create a new filter).
2. Under Has the words, try something like bill OR statement OR invoice OR receipt OR "payment due" OR "payment confirmation" — or, more reliably, use From to match specific senders (your bank, utility company, credit card) if you know their addresses.
3. Click Create filter.
4. Check Forward it to and choose your Budget Pilot address from the dropdown — it only appears here once part 1's verification is complete.
5. Click Create filter to save. Your inbox is unaffected; forwarding sends a copy, it doesn't remove or move the original.

Send yourself a test email matching your filter (or wait for a real one), then check Bills → Bills detected from email or the Review Queue a minute or two later.

Outlook and other providers

Any provider with a rule/filter feature works the same way in principle: verify the address if it's required, then create a rule that forwards matching mail to it. In Outlook, that's Settings → Mail → Rules.

Cash Flow & Long-Term Projection

Two related tools, both driven by your unmatched bills for a chosen account. Cash Flow Projection picks an end date and lists every contributing bill individually with its date, amount, and a running balance, so you can see exactly what's driving the number rather than a single total to take on faith. Long-Term Projection covers the same ground further out — 3 to 24 months — bucketed into whole-month checkpoints instead of one row per bill, so a dip several months away is easier to spot than in a day-by-day list.

Committed vs. Realistic

Committed is the number both tools always showed: your current balance plus every unmatched bill and expected paycheck between now and the date in question — figures you actually have a specific date and amount for. Realistic goes one step further, adding your budgeted amount for every category that has no bill of its own (groceries, entertainment, and similar spending with no fixed schedule), pro-rated for the window you're looking at.

Realistic only appears for your primary spending account (or, before you've set one, any checking/savings account) — since your budget isn't tied to a specific account, showing the same household-wide estimate on every checking account at once would count the same spending more than once.

Income Statement

Revenue, expenses, and net income for the selected date range, compared against the equivalent prior period. This is a real accounting-style statement — debt principal payments are correctly excluded as transfers, not expenses, so it won't overstate your spending the way a simple "money out" total would.

Balance Sheet

A snapshot of what you own (assets — cash, investments, property, vehicles) and what you owe (liabilities — credit cards, mortgage, loans) as of a point in time, with Net Worth as the difference between them. Assets are grouped into sections (Cash & Equivalents, Investments, Fixed & Long-Term Assets, etc.); Liabilities into their own sections too (Credit Cards, Mortgages, Personal Loans, Car Loans) rather than one flat list.

Pick a Compare to option and the Net Worth section expands into a roll-forward: Beginning Net Worth (your comparison point) plus Net Income for the period since — the exact same figure the Income Statement shows for that period — plus Other Balance Sheet Changes, which equals Ending Net Worth exactly. "Other" covers everything a cash-basis Income Statement doesn't count as income or expense: Balance Adjustments (bank-sync corrections, and often unrealized investment or property value changes, since neither has any other way into the books), Debt Principal & Transfers, and any new account's starting balance. Click "Other Balance Sheet Changes" to see that breakdown.

Cash Flow Statement

Tracks actual cash moving through your checking, savings, and money market accounts over the selected period — deliberately scoped to real liquid cash, so it doesn't mix in non-cash balance-sheet bookkeeping from your debt accounts.

Monthly Income Statement

The same Income Statement structure, but broken out month-by-month across a full year for a closer look at trends than the range-based Income Statement gives you.

Spending by Vendor

Groups your expense transactions by vendor rather than category — who you actually paid, not what you bought it for. This is the report to check if you want to know your real total spent at one store or service across every card and category it shows up on, instead of scattered across a dozen near-identical raw bank description lines.

Setting a vendor

Vendor is a separate, optional field on the Add/Edit transaction form. Set it once for a transaction and this report groups by it; leave it blank and the report falls back to the transaction's Description instead, so nothing is left out just because a vendor was never set.

Tax Summary

Groups your transactions into commonly tax-relevant lines (self-employment income, charitable contributions, medical expenses, mortgage interest, retirement contributions, and more) to hand to a CPA or tax preparer as a starting point. This report defaults to the prior calendar year the first time you open it, since taxes are naturally a year-in-review look rather than a year-to-date one.

Household & Sharing

Everyone signed into the same household sees the same accounts, transactions, budgets, and reports — this is how Budget Pilot supports couples and families tracking finances together rather than one login per person.

People on transactions

The Person field on a transaction (used for the by-person breakdown on the Transactions tab) doesn't require that person to have their own Budget Pilot login — it's just a label, so you can track "Mom bought this" or "Kid's allowance" without creating a separate account for them.

CPA Marketplace

The CPA Marketplace lets you exchange your financial reports securely with a tax professional, or find one in Budget Pilot's curated directory. It's accessible from the Household tab and from the Reports tab.

Share with CPA

"Share with CPA" bundles all five of your reports — Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Monthly Income Detail, and Tax Summary — into a single Excel workbook for the year or years you choose. It gives you a secure, expiring download link. No one needs a Budget Pilot account to open it. Enter your CPA's email and Budget Pilot will send them the link directly; leave it blank and you'll get a link to paste into your own email.

Links expire after 7, 14, or 30 days — your choice. You can see your recent shares and revoke one early at any time, which immediately invalidates the link.

Find a CPA

Budget Pilot maintains a short list of tax and accounting firms that are familiar with the app and the reports it produces. Each listing has been spot-checked against that state's public CPA license database. Firms marked Verified CPA have a confirmed active license on file. Click "Request intro" next to any firm to open the Share with CPA flow pre-addressed to them.

If you don't yet have a CPA and want to be matched with one, use the "Request intro" button — it routes through the Share with CPA flow so the CPA receives your reports and contact information together, not a cold inquiry.

Data & Privacy

Your financial data belongs to your household and is only visible to people signed into that household — Budget Pilot's database enforces this at the row level, not just in the app's interface.

You can edit or delete any individual account, transaction, or budget item directly in the app at any time. To delete your entire account and all associated data, email mark@trybudgetpilot.com — full details are in the Privacy Policy.

Troubleshooting

My reports look empty

Check the date range at the top of the page — every tab shares the same filter, so a range that doesn't cover your transactions will make every report look empty even though your data is safely there. Try "All-time" to confirm.

A transaction looks miscategorized after import

Category, Group, and Type are always re-derived from whatever Category your file specified — open the transaction and correct the Category directly, or set up an Autocoding Rule so future imports get it right automatically.

My debt payment is showing as a huge expense

Make sure the account is set up with the correct account type (Mortgage, Loan, Car Loan, or Credit Card) under Your Accounts — principal payments are only automatically reclassified as transfers when the account itself is correctly typed as a debt.

My mortgage or loan balance isn't going down

The principal portion of a payment has to be entered as a positive amount on the loan account itself to actually reduce its balance — see Mortgage & Loan Payments for the full walkthrough and the sign that trips people up most.

Something looks wrong and I'm not sure why

Email mark@trybudgetpilot.com directly — Budget Pilot is built and supported by Mark Chapman, CPA, so you'll hear back from whoever actually wrote the code, not a support queue. About Mark →