It started as an argument about arithmetic

Paid every two weeks, you receive twenty-six cheques a year. Divide by twelve and you get 2.17 cheques a month, which is a number no employer has ever paid anyone. Ten months of the year the real figure is lower than the plan assumes. Two months it is much higher, and the surplus gets absorbed without anyone deciding where it went.

The same mistake happens on the other side of the ledger. Car insurance twice a year, a registration once, three annual subscriptions renewing in the same fortnight because that is when they were signed up for. Divided by twelve, each of them looks small and even. On the day they land, together, they are a month that cannot be covered.

Every budgeting app we tried solved this by asking for a bank connection and then showing us where the money had already gone. That is a different product. We wanted the plan, made honestly, on the real calendar — and we wanted it without handing our income to a company whose business model we would have to go and read.

So: four views over one set of numbers, six real cadences, income sources that carry the date they actually arrive, and a file you can keep on your own disk. No account unless you want the same budget on your phone. The writing goes through the arithmetic properly if you want it.