Envelopes

Create your own envelopes if you want to isolate more than our 10 standard categories.

We find that more can be better for people looking to eliminate or control specific spending. We’ve used envelopes temporarily for vacations, but also narrowed down things like Food to more categories like Groceries and Restaurants.

Starting a new month

Keepify does not currently support future transactions nor future month planning. Your budget and categories will roll over to the next month when it comes and you can adjust the categories from there as needed.

If you shuffle money between envelopes, that change will not be rolled over from month to month budget. Those changes are considered to be one-time adjustments.

These features are on our product roadmap. Email us if they’re critical for you.

Shuffling money between envelopes

Sometimes one category is over and you need to move money from another envelope to cover it, but you don’t want this to change your budget every month. Shuffle money does exactly that.

Click the crossed arrows on an envelope to get started.

Transactions

Where and how do I add transactions?

We think the ideal way is the home screen with the category + buttons. That starts you out with the category prefilled. You can do almost everything from the home screen once your budget and categories are setup.

How can I see all the transactions in a category?

How can I see all my eating out transactions?Click the category on the home screen to see just those transactions.

Searching transactions

Finding specific transactions is best done using the transactions page. You can type in any details about the transaction to search across them be it description, account, payee, or amounts.

Adding a partner/spouse or accountability partner

Budgets work better when everyone is involved. After all, we created Keepify in order to better track our spending with our spouses and make better choices. That might be a planned one in the evening at the dinner table in a budget meeting, but it might also be a quick check to know if we have the budget to order pizza.

Adding a budget partner is a core part of Keepify and we aim to be the best budgeting system for collaborating with your partner out there.

We also hear from singles that want some accountability from a friend or a roommate. We’ve made that possible as well. You can share your whole budget or just a few categories in a separate budget from your main one. This makes shared expenses simple. It also makes getting some feedback on your out of control shoe budget or eating out habits easy. Trust us, it helps!

Linked versus Manual

You can use Keepify with linked accounts that download transactions automatically from your bank and credit cards or you can input transactions manually.

Automatic importing has the benefit of less work and less dependence on your accuracy. Manual input has the advantage of greater influence over your behavior when you know you’re going to enter the amount. It’s a lot like paying with cash (harder) versus plastic. You can also import transactions to increase accuracy and reduce manual labor.

We expect account integration to be the most common path but everyone should understand the benefits of seeing the spending closer to the actual spending. It makes you a better budgeter, even if you only do it for a month or two.

Importing transactions

For anyone using manual accounts or generally not wishing to automatically import transactions, you may want to import transaction files that you download from your bank. We can help!

Simply choose a CSV file you download from your bank. If anything goes wrong or needs adjusting in the file, we’ll show you.

We’ll also prompt you to add new Accounts or Envelopes if necessary. This lets you create custom spreadsheets or CSV files to import your transactions to your own liking.

Once you’re ready to import, create any missing accounts or envelopes as prompted and click the import button.

Accounts

There are two types of Accounts: Manual and Linked.

Manual accounts are kept up by hand where you input each transaction as they happen. This is useful for saving money and knowing exactly where each dollar goes.

Linked accounts import transactions from your bank or credit card and remove some of the work involved in maintaining a budget. They are useful to maintain the habit and simplify. Most people are more successful with linked accounts over time, but manual accounts have big benefits like reducing overall spending by calling attention to it.

Accounts are useful in a manual context if you want to be able to verify transactions against a specific account — like a bank or card statement. You may also want to track accounts but be uncomfortable with importing transactions or linking accounts for security reasons. While we offer the best possible security we can and trust Keepify with our own data, we understand that any account linkage is too much for some folks.

Linked Accounts

Linking accounts is easy. Navigate to the Accounts page and select the bottom right option to add a linked account. This will start an easy and often familiar process through Plaid. Plaid is an industry leading banking information provider. They help us deliver world class security and convenience throughout the process.

Once you enter your credentials and connect your account, we’ll start automatically recording your transactions as they happen. We’ll even pull in transactions from a couple weeks back to help you plan if you’re late starting the month.

Credit cards and payments

Handling credit cards is an important part of budgeting for many of us. Credit card debt is a terrible thing, but there are reasons many of us use them in spite of the potential for overspending. Let’s address how to handle that in Keepify.

The budgeting part is simple. You put the money you need in each Envelope and attach the transactions where you spend that money be it for food or gas or nail polish into the Enveloper for that transaction. Sometimes that transaction will be made via credit card rather than cash, debit, ACH, check or the odd wire transaction.

Manual account credit card process

If you made the transaction via credit card and are using manual processes to keep track you will likely want to attach an Account for the credit card to the transaction to keep it organized. That done you can hive five someone. Entering the transaction appropriately is the end of this story. Nice job!

Linked account credit card process

If the transaction is pulled in automatically to your Imported grouping you’ll need to take a couple steps and be aware of a few tricks to keep your budget organized.

1. Find the newly imported credit card transaction or Link your account
2. Assign the transaction to the proper Envelope to track your budget spending
3. Let the transaction for paying off the credit card from your bank and the transaction clearing the balance on the card from your card’s account stay together in Imported where they will amount to zero.

This process works if you are paying off the card each month and now that you’re budgeting that’s exactly how you should handle your cards as soon as you’re able.

Reports

See your spending broken down by Envelopes, time periods, or merchants/payees. You can compare one month’s spending to the past few or review your annual budget categories every quarter.

Clicking on a bar filters the Envelopes to a specific set from the ‘Other’ group or to the specific set of transactions contained in a specific Envelope.

Goals

Add goals for targeted savings goals like Christmas or a vacation. Or add goals to manage a sinking fund that you roll over month to month.

Many people use sinking funds for maintenance categories like automotive. They budget some money each month and then spend the money as the expenses or maintenance demands.

Keepify allows sinking funds with Target Balance goals. Add transactions marked without “expense” checked to fund the goals. Add transactions leaving the “expense” default checked to spend like you would from any envelope.

Target Balance by Date goals are used differently than sinking funds that rarely if ever expire. You might use a sinking fund for paying property taxes, insurance, or typical Christmas expenses. However, you’d use a by Date goal for a one time big expense like a special vacation.

These goals shine when you don’t expect to need them once the amount is saved and spent.

All goals support spending some of the money before the target date smartly. If you have a special gift of $100 to save for and it consists of three parts, you can safely spend when you need to along the way to your $100 and the Goal will understand where you are in the process. This is great for something like a trip where you may buy tickets in advance but still have a month or two to save for the rest.

FAQ

That isn’t showing up

My budget doesn’t look up to date

First try a hard refresh. On mobile drag down from the top until the app refreshes. On desktop try Ctrl-R or Cmd-R to force your browser to refresh.

Keepify uses modern technology to make the experience on your device and in your browser fast even when you have no connectivity.

How to see a list of transactions that were imported that I have not yet categorized.

Just open your Imported envelope. This is where all recently imported transactions go.