Budget lines

Budget lines organize your transactions in Commander Finance into categories that track spending and income patterns. Each line operates as an independent container where transactions accumulate according to your chosen budgeting mode. Commander calculates totals, displays progress, and provides detailed spending analysis for each line throughout your budget cycles.

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Creating, editing, and deleting lines

When you create a budget line, you provide a name and color that identify the line throughout the app. The new line appears on the Budget page, but shows no activity until you assign transactions to it.

• Targets Mode: the create and edit form includes a target amount field that sets your spending goal for the current and future cycles.
• Envelope Mode: the create form includes an initial funding field where you transfer money from your unbudgeted funds pool into the new line.

Editing a line lets you change its name or color at any time. These changes update the line across all historical records and carry forward into future cycles without triggering recalculations. Archive a budget line when you want to remove it from the active list while keeping its history. Archiving prevents new transaction assignments but preserves all historical data. Delete a budget line only when you want to erase its historical activity; deletion requires reassigning or removing every associated transaction first, and alters historical records as if the line never existed.

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Budget page overview

The Budget page groups your budget lines into a Spending section and an Income section, each with a subtotal for the current cycle. A section with no lines in it doesn’t appear at all. A funnel button in the Budget Lines header, beside New Line, opens a panel that narrows which lines are listed and sets the order of the ones that remain. Below each line’s name, a gauge fills to show its activity against a mode-specific bound:

• Tracking Mode: the gauge fills based on this cycle’s activity compared to last cycle’s total—for example, spending $70 this cycle versus $100 last cycle fills the gauge to 70%.
• Targets Mode: for a spending line, the gauge fills toward your defined target; for an income line, it fills toward your income target instead.
• Envelope Mode: the gauge fills based on spending against available funds, which includes carryover from the previous cycle plus net transfers into the envelope.

Above the sections sit two readouts: a headline figure stating the cycle’s key number—Unbudgeted Funds in Envelope Mode, the amount you’re over or under budget in Targets Mode, or this cycle’s spent or net income in Tracking Mode—and a Spending pace chart plotting this cycle’s cumulative spending against last cycle’s. A row above the cycle selector counts the transactions not yet assigned to a budget line, for example 12 unbudgeted transactions, and reads Review on the right. Click the row to open the Unbudgeted Transactions page and assign the transactions there. The row appears only while that count is above zero. A set of reference panels sits beside the sections on wide screens and below them on narrow ones:

• A Cycle Summary panel, present in every mode, always reporting spending for this cycle and last. Targets Mode adds targeted and remaining targeted amounts across all lines; Envelope Mode adds funding remaining across all envelopes.
• In Envelope Mode, a Line Transfers section recording movements between envelopes, transfers from Unbudgeted Funds, and funds scheduled into upcoming cycles.

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Ordering the lines

The filter panel’s sort control offers three orders, and reads Attention until you change it. Spending and income sort separately, so the two sections never interleave.

• Attention: the default, and the only order that reacts to how a line is doing.
• Name (A–Z): alphabetical across the whole section, ignoring how urgent a line is.
• Custom: the order you arrange the lines in yourself. Until you move a line, Custom lists them alphabetically and leaves favorites in place. Once you have arranged some lines, a line you haven’t placed, one you just created or created on another device, sorts after them, alphabetically among the other unplaced lines.

Under Attention, lines that need a look rise to the top, in three groups:

1. Lines that are over their limit.
2. Lines carrying a goal that reads Off course or Missed, and, in Targets Mode, lines with no target set.
3. Everything else.

Lines are alphabetical within each group. Favorite a line to keep it at the top of its section. Open the line’s overflow menu and choose Add to favorites; a star appears beside the line’s name, and the line rises above the rest under Attention and Name (A–Z). Custom shows the star but leaves the line where it sits, since that order is yours to set. Remove from favorites unpins the line. Under Custom, rearrange a section by dragging a line’s handle, or with Move up and Move down in the line’s overflow menu. The handles appear only while the filter panel is open; the menu actions don’t need the panel. Applying a filter turns off both, so clear the filter before rearranging. Commander saves your sort order, favorites, and custom arrangement per budget, on the device where you set them. These settings don’t sync, so another device keeps its own.

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Gauge colors

Each line’s gauge fills in one of four tones, set by how far activity has run against the mode’s bound— 90% marks the warning point, and passing the bound entirely marks the overrun. The swatches below show the light-theme colors; dark mode uses a lighter shade of each. Income and spending lines share the same gauge logic in Envelope Mode and Tracking Mode. Targets Mode is the exception, since a spending line has a limit to breach while an income line only has a target to reach.

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Reading the Budget Line Detail page

The detail page for a budget line answers “where does this line stand right now,” from the top of the page down. The header shows the line’s name and a mode-specific figure: remaining funds in Envelope Mode, the amount remaining against your target in Targets Mode, or the amount spent or earned this cycle in Tracking Mode. Edit Line opens the line’s edit form. The overflow menu holds Archive Line, or Restore Line for a line you’ve already archived—an archived line also shows an “Archived” chip beside its name. Below the header, a cycle instrument pairs a pacing gauge with a cumulative activity chart. The gauge shows how far into the cycle you are against how much the line has consumed; the chart plots this cycle’s running activity against last cycle’s, day by day, so you can compare how the current cycle is tracking. The Goals section lists the goals set on this line, each with its progress and status, and a New Goal action to add one. Two reference panels sit below the goals—side by side on wider screens, stacked on narrow ones. The first reflects your budget mode:

• Tracking Mode: this cycle’s spending and income against last cycle’s totals.
• Targets Mode: the targeted and remaining amounts for the current cycle, plus a target history recording every target you’ve set for the line.
• Envelope Mode: remaining funds in the envelope and a funding history of every transfer in and out, including movements from the unbudgeted funds pool and exchanges with other lines, with a Move Funds action.

The second panel holds spending and earning statistics across periods—this cycle, week, month, and year to date—alongside their prior-period counterparts. Positive amounts appear in green, negative amounts in red. A full-width transactions ledger lists every transaction assigned to the line, with New Transaction to add one.