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Autopilot and Quick Budget

Most months look mostly alike: same rent, similar groceries, the usual subscriptions. Autopilot lets you design that default month once, and Quick Budget fills a real month from it in one move.

Designing your default month

The Autopilot page asks one question: if a typical month's income is X, where should it go?

You give it a planning income (a hypothetical number, separate from your real income transactions) and a default monthly amount for each category. An allocation bar shows how the total splits across your groups, and a running remainder counts down as you assign. Like the real budget, the goal is zero: the whole hypothetical income has a destination.

Nothing here moves real money. It's a template, a flight plan for an ordinary month.

Quick Budget: the template, applied

On the budget page, Quick Budget fills the current month's envelopes with your autopilot amounts in one action. Then you adjust for what makes this month different: the car registration, the birthday, the annual bill that landed.

That's the rhythm: design the default once, start each month from it in seconds, spend your attention only on the exceptions.

Sweeping what's left

At the end of a month, Quick Budget's two sweep actions gather up leftovers in one move:

  • Budget to Zero sweeps every category's entire remaining balance, including money rolled over from past months.
  • Leftover for Month sweeps only the unspent part of what you budgeted this month; rolled-over balances stay put.

Either way, you pick where the swept money lands: back in Available to Budget, in any category, straight into your runway while you're building one, or toward a pre-budget debt. A debt only ever takes what it still needs; anything beyond that returns to Available to Budget.

Covering overspending from here too

Quick Budget also has a Cover Overspending action that zeroes out every overspent category from one source you pick. If you usually cover from the same place, set a default source on the Autopilot page and it will be preselected. More in Overspending.

Related: The Climb method · Overspending · Building your runway

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