How to run your budget in Envelop

Why Envelop is manual

Envelop is built on one simple belief: budgeting only works when you are paying attention. A lot of apps connect straight to your bank, pull in your transactions for you, and try to sort them into categories on their own. It sounds convenient, and that is exactly the problem. When the app does everything for you, you stop looking, and a budget you never look at stops changing what you do.

So Envelop asks you to enter your own transactions. That sounds like more work, but it is the whole point. The few seconds it takes to type in a purchase is the moment you actually see the money leave, feel it, and decide whether it was worth it. That small habit is what makes budgeting work. It is also why Envelop never asks for your bank login, never breaks when a bank connection drops, and never hands you a pile of miscategorized transactions to clean up.

To keep the typing from becoming a chore, Envelop does the repetitive parts for you. Bills and paychecks that happen on a schedule can post on their own or with a single tap, so the only things you enter by hand are the ones worth a second look anyway. You will set those up under recurring transactions.

What envelope budgeting is

Envelope budgeting is an old idea, and it is about as simple as it gets. Picture cashing your paycheck and sorting the bills into labeled envelopes on your kitchen table: one for rent, one for groceries, one for gas, one for fun. You spend from each envelope until it is empty, and when it is empty, you are done spending on that thing until you fill it again. That is the whole system. Envelop just does it on your phone or computer instead of with paper and cash.

Two ideas make it work. The first is that every dollar gets a job. Money sitting around with no label is the money that disappears without you noticing, so you hand all of it out, right down to zero. The second is that you only budget money you actually have. You are dividing up the real dollars sitting in your accounts today, not guessing about a paycheck that has not arrived yet. When new money comes in, you divide that up too.

And your envelopes carry over. Whatever is left in an envelope at the end of the month is still there the next month. So a month where you spend less on groceries builds a little cushion, and an envelope you are saving into slowly fills on its own. Envelop keeps track of all of it for you. If the idea is new to you, why envelope budgeting works is a good next read.

Adding your accounts

An account in Envelop stands for a real place your money lives: your checking account, a savings account, a credit card. Adding these first means your budget starts from your real balances.

To add one, open the Accounts screen and click Add account. Then:

1. Give it a name you will recognize, like "Chase Checking."
2. Choose the type: Checking, Savings, or Credit.
3. Type in the balance it has right now. Envelop saves this as your starting point so everything lines up with reality. For a credit card, this is the amount you currently owe.

There is one choice worth understanding: the Off-budget checkbox. Leave it unchecked for the accounts you spend and budget from day to day, like your checking account and your credit cards. Check it for money you want to keep an eye on but are not handing out to envelopes, like a retirement account or a brokerage. A simple way to decide: if you pay for things out of it, keep it on-budget; if you only watch it grow, make it off-budget. There is a fuller explanation in on-budget versus off-budget accounts.

Groups and envelopes

Envelopes are the jobs your money does. Groups are the bigger areas those jobs belong to. Think of it in two layers: a handful of groups like Housing, Food, Transportation, and Fun, with specific envelopes inside each one. Inside Food you might have Groceries and Dining Out. Inside Housing, Rent and Utilities.

To build them, go to the Budget screen and:

1. Scroll to the bottom and click Add group. Name it, and it appears.
2. Under a group, click Add envelope and type a name. As you type, Envelop suggests a matching emoji on its own, so "Groceries" picks up a shopping cart without you looking for one.
3. To rearrange things, grab the little handle on the left of any group or envelope and drag it. Put your must-pay envelopes near the top so you fund them first.

A piece of advice worth taking: start with fewer, broader envelopes than you think you need. One Groceries envelope, not five. It is tempting to make separate envelopes for coffee, snacks, and takeout, but then every purchase turns into a filing decision, and that wears you down fast. Begin broad, and split something out later, in the month you genuinely want to watch it on its own.

Build envelopes for more than just the bills, too. Your money goes to three kinds of things: the regular stuff (rent, utilities, groceries), the fun and flexible stuff (eating out, hobbies, spending money), and the expenses that only show up now and then (car repairs, the holidays, the insurance bill that hits once a year). That last kind is what catches most people off guard, and the fix is a savings envelope you fill a little at a time. More on that under goals and sinking funds. The full method is in how to set up your envelopes.

Deleting a group or an envelope

Deleting in Envelop does not erase your history, and that is deliberate. When you delete an envelope, whatever is still sitting in it returns to To allocate so you can put it somewhere useful, and every transaction that ever pointed at it is kept exactly as it was. Deleting a group does the same thing to every envelope inside it at once.

What you will notice afterwards is that those old transactions still show the envelope's name, struck through and marked Deleted. They are locked at that point, so you cannot reassign them to something else. That is the trade: your spending history stays truthful about where the money actually went at the time, rather than being rewritten behind your back every time you reorganize. If you want a fresh start on how your budget is arranged, build the new envelopes and let the old ones sit in the record behind you.

Assigning your money

When money lands in an account, it does not go straight into your envelopes. It waits at the top of the Budget screen in a box called To allocate. That box is the pile of dollars that still need a job, and your task is to hand every one of them out until the box reads zero.

To fund an envelope, click it on the Budget screen. It opens up with an Add box. Type how much you want to put in and click Add, or just press Enter. The money moves out of To allocate and into that envelope. Work down your list this way until To allocate reaches zero and every dollar has a home.

A couple of shortcuts. When you edit an envelope you can give it a monthly target (the amount it "needs"). Once you have targets set, click the To allocate box at the top and you can fund every envelope to its target in one move, or fund a single group at a time. And if you ever assign more than you actually have, To allocate turns red and shows a negative number. That is Envelop telling you that you have promised money you do not have, so take some back out of an envelope until it is at zero or above. There is a walkthrough of a real paycheck in assigning your paycheck.

Entering what you spend

A transaction is any time money moves, and entering it is the habit the whole app is built around. On a computer, click Add transaction at the top of the screen. On a phone, tap the green plus in the bar along the bottom. Either one opens the same entry box, and on a phone that button is there on every screen, so you can enter something the moment you think of it.

For money you spend, choose Expense, then fill in:

• the account it came out of,
• who you paid,
• the amount,
• and the envelope it should come out of.

Save it, and that envelope's balance drops by what you spent. Envelop remembers your payees, so the next time you type "Whole Foods" it suggests the envelope you used last time.

For money coming in, choose Income and pick the account and amount. Income does not get an envelope, because it is not spending. It flows into To allocate so you can divide it up. Once a purchase has actually gone through at your bank, you can mark it cleared, which matters later when you reconcile.

Finding something you entered

There is a search box next to the month at the top of your transactions. Type into it and the list narrows to what matches, checking who you paid, the note you left, and the envelope it came out of. So you can find a shop by name, or pull up everything that ever came out of Car Repairs.

Searching deliberately ignores the month you are looking at. Asking about a shop almost never means asking about that shop in July, so a search covers your whole history and the month arrows grey out while you are typing. Above the results Envelop tells you how many it found and what they come to. Clear the box and you are back in the month you left.

The account filter still applies while you search, which is how you ask a narrower question: everything from that one shop, on that one card. There are matching search boxes on the Recurring and Payees tabs, which work the same way on those lists.

Transfers

A transfer is money moving between two of your own accounts, like checking to savings. It is not spending, it is the same money in a different spot, so you enter it once and Envelop records both sides for you.

To do it, click Add transaction, choose Transfer, pick the account the money is leaving and the account it is going to, enter the amount, and save. Envelop creates both halves and keeps them linked, so if you later change the amount or delete it, both sides update together. In your transaction list it appears as a single line naming both accounts, because one movement of money should read as one entry.

What a transfer does to your budget depends on the accounts involved:

• Between two on-budget accounts, like checking to savings, nothing in your budget changes. The money is still yours to spend.
• Moving money from an on-budget account out to an off-budget one takes it out of your budget, so To allocate goes down by that amount.
• Bringing money back from off-budget to on-budget adds it to To allocate.
• Paying a credit card is also a transfer, from your checking to the card. There is more on how cards work just below.

A transfer can repeat on a schedule too, which is worth doing for a card payment or a standing move into savings. See recurring transactions.

Refunds

A refund is money coming back into an envelope: a return, a reimbursement from a friend, a canceled charge. It has its own type because it is not the same as income. Income has no envelope and adds to your To allocate. A refund goes back into the specific envelope the money came from, undoing part of what you spent there.

To record one, click Add transaction, choose Refund, pick the envelope the money is going back into, and enter the amount. Returned groceries go back into Groceries, and that envelope's balance goes back up. If you get back more than you spent in that envelope for the month, its spending simply shows as a negative number, which is exactly right.

Splitting a purchase

Sometimes one purchase covers a few envelopes at once. A trip to a big store might be part groceries, part household, part a birthday gift. A split lets you enter that as one transaction while sending each piece to the right envelope.

To do it, start a transaction as usual, turn on Split, and add a line for each envelope with its amount. The lines have to add up to the total of the purchase. When you save, each piece lands in its own envelope, so your spending stays accurate instead of being lumped into one place.

Payees

A payee is simply whoever you paid, and Envelop builds the list on its own as you enter transactions. You never have to set them up. But there is a screen for tidying them, and it is worth ten minutes every few months. Go to Transactions and click the Payees tab, where you will see everywhere you have paid along with how many times you have used each one.

Three things you can do there. You can rename one, which fixes a typo everywhere it appears at once. You can pin a default envelope to a payee, so the next time you type that name Envelop fills the envelope in for you rather than guessing from what you did last time. And you can merge two payees, which is the one that earns its keep: type a name slightly differently a few times and you end up with Walmart, WalMart, and Wal-Mart as three separate payees splitting your history three ways. Merging folds them together and moves every transaction onto the one you keep.

You can also archive a payee you no longer use. That keeps it out of your suggestions while leaving your old transactions untouched. Deleting outright is only possible for a payee nothing points at, which is why archiving exists: Envelop will not cut a hole in your own history without telling you.

The calculator

There is a Calculator in the left sidebar. It is there for a specific moment: you are dividing up a paycheck, working out what is left after rent, or splitting a bill three ways, and you do not want to leave the app to do arithmetic on your phone.

It keeps a Recent list of what you have worked out, and each entry has a Use button that hands the result back to you. So you can total up four numbers, then take that figure straight over to the envelope you were funding.

Recurring transactions

Recurring transactions are what keep entering your own transactions from becoming a burden. You set up anything that happens on a schedule once, and Envelop handles it from then on: rent, your paycheck, subscriptions, the yearly insurance bill.

To set one up, go to Transactions, click the Recurring tab, and click Add. Fill in the amount, the account, the envelope, and who it is paid to, then choose how often it repeats: weekly, every two weeks, twice a month, monthly, or once a year, along with the day it lands on.

There is one switch worth understanding, labelled Create automatically (no approval needed). For a bill that is the same every time, like rent, turn it on and Envelop enters the transaction for you when it is due. For a bill that changes, like the power bill, leave it off. Envelop will tell you it is due and let you type in the real amount before it posts, so nothing goes in wrong and nothing is forgotten. There is more in recurring transactions for bills.

If a bill lands on the 29th, 30th, or the last day of the month, pick that day and Envelop handles the short months for you. February falls back to the 28th and every other month keeps the day you chose, so a rule set to the 30th does not drift earlier as the year goes on.

Recurring transfers and card payments

A recurring item can be a transfer rather than an expense or income. Choose Transfer as the type and pick the account the money goes to. That covers a standing move into savings, and it covers your credit card payments.

A card payment is a special case, because you cannot know months ahead what you will pay. When the account you are paying is a credit card, Envelop stops asking for an amount at all. The calendar and the Upcoming list show what that card's payment envelope is currently holding instead, and you enter the real figure when you approve it. Auto-post is not offered for these, since there is no amount for Envelop to post on its own.

The Upcoming list

On the Transactions tab, anything due in the next seven days sits in an Upcoming panel above your transactions, so you can approve or skip it without going anywhere. It shows three at a time with a link to the rest.

Anything already past its due date stays in that list, marked as due, until you actually do something with it. A bill you have not got round to entering does not vanish the day it was due, which is the point: the list is asking you a question, and it keeps asking until you answer.

The calendar

Once you have a few recurring items set up, the calendar is where you see them laid out. Go to Transactions and click the Calendar tab. On a computer you get a month grid; on a phone you get the same month as a simple list you can scroll. Either way you are looking at what is dated but not yet dealt with: your recurring bills and paychecks, plus any one-off transaction you entered with a future date. Anything whose date has already gone by without you acting on it stays on the calendar too, marked Overdue, rather than disappearing on you.

But the calendar does something more useful than showing you what is coming. It tells you whether you can actually pay for it.

Envelop walks through the month in date order and spends your envelopes down as it goes, the way real life would. Rent comes out of Housing on the first, the power bill comes out of Utilities on the tenth, and by the time it reaches the fifteenth it knows what is genuinely left in each envelope. Every item then gets marked: Funded if the money is there, or Short with the exact amount missing if it is not. Anything already past its date is flagged Overdue. At the top of the month you get a single Needs funding total, which is the amount you would have to assign to make the whole month work.

This is the part worth slowing down on. A budget can look completely fine today and still be short on the fifteenth. The Budget screen shows you where you stand right now; the calendar shows you where you are heading. Seeing "Short $40" on a bill three weeks out is a small problem you can solve today by moving money. Finding out on the day it hits is a different kind of problem.

Some items simply do not get a badge, and that is on purpose. Income, refunds, and transfers between your own accounts do not come out of an envelope, so there is nothing to check them against. Neither does an item you have not assigned to an envelope yet. Envelop would rather say nothing than tell you something is short when it has no way of knowing.

A credit card payment is the exception, and it works differently on purpose. Since it carries no set amount, there is nothing for Funded or Short to measure it against. It shows you what the card's payment envelope is holding instead, with the card's current balance beside it. The set-aside figure is the one to act on, because it is the money you have already put by for that card, and it grows as you fund the envelope through the month. The balance next to it is what the card owes today rather than a statement balance, so pay whatever you decide and whatever is left over rolls forward.

Acting on something from the calendar

Click or tap any item and a panel opens with what you need. You can change the amount, which is what you will do for a bill that lands different every month, and you can choose when to record it under Post it on: its due date, today, or a date you pick. Then post it or skip it.

Approving something dated ahead enters it straight away, which means the money is held for it from that moment even though the date has not arrived. That is deliberate: it is spoken for, so your envelope should say so. Open it again and you can change the amount or the date, or undo the approval entirely. Undoing hands the money back to the envelope and puts the item back on the calendar as pending, on the same date it had before, so approving something by mistake costs you nothing.

On a computer, a day with more than two items shows a link for the remainder. Click that link, or the day number itself, and the whole day opens in a panel with its total for the day, where every item behaves exactly as it does on the grid.

Two things worth knowing. Only the next item due on a schedule can be posted, because posting one further out would skip everything in between without a word and leave gaps in your history. And whichever date you post it on, the schedule keeps counting from the original due date, so paying rent two days early does not slowly walk your rent to the wrong day of the month.

Goals and sinking funds

Here is one of the best habits Envelop gives you. A sinking fund is just an envelope you fill a little at a time for something that is coming but is not a monthly bill: car repairs, the holidays, a new laptop, the insurance premium that lands once a year. You put a bit in every month, it builds up, and when the big expense finally arrives the money is already sitting there waiting. No scramble, no reaching for a credit card.

A goal puts a target on one of those envelopes so Envelop can do the math for you. And you are not limited to one. An envelope can hold as many goals as you like, which is handy when a single envelope is saving toward a few different things at once.

How to set a goal on an envelope

1. On the Budget screen, find the envelope and click the View details icon on the right side of its row. A panel opens.
2. In that panel, click the Goals tab.
3. Click Add goal.
4. Give it a name (like "Vacation"), a target amount (like $3,000), and the date you want to have it by.
5. Click Add.

Envelop then works out how much you need to set aside each month, each week, and even each day to reach that target on time, and shows your progress toward it. Want to save toward two things in the same envelope? Click Add goal again and enter the second one; both live on that envelope side by side. To change a goal's amount or date, or to remove it, use the edit and delete controls next to it on that same Goals tab.

When a goal reaches its target it is marked as reached, but the money stays put until you want it. When you are ready to actually spend it on what you saved for, click Move to envelope on the goal. That hands everything you set aside straight into the envelope the goal belongs to, ready to spend, and closes the goal out. So the vacation you saved for lands in your Vacation envelope the moment you are ready to book it.

Credit cards

Credit cards trip up most budgets, because you spend now and pay later, and it is easy to lose track of how much of that balance you can actually cover. Envelop handles this with a payment envelope.

When you add a credit card account, Envelop automatically creates a matching payment envelope for it. From then on, every time you buy something on the card and assign it to an envelope, Envelop moves that same amount into the card's payment envelope. So if you charge $60 of groceries, $60 shifts from Groceries into the card's payment envelope. The result is that the payment envelope always shows exactly how much you have set aside to pay the card, money you already know you have.

When you pay the bill, you record it as a transfer from your checking account to the card, which brings the payment envelope back down. You never pick an envelope for that transfer yourself. Envelop knows which card you are paying and draws the right payment envelope down for you, and the transaction shows you which one it used. If the payment happens on the same date every month, set it up as a recurring transfer so it turns up on the calendar with the amount you have set aside already shown. Cash-back rewards and refunds on the card lower what you owe and adjust the set-aside to match. One thing to know: if you already carried a balance before you started using Envelop, that older debt is treated as something to pay down on purpose, not something the payment envelope fills for you automatically.

A payment envelope is not quite like your other envelopes, so it is worth saying what is different. You do not give it a monthly target, because it is not a spending plan you set: it fills itself from what you actually charge, so a target would always read as already met. It also always rolls over, and cannot be switched off, because underpaying a card on purpose is a normal thing to do and the difference has to stay put until you pay it. Those two settings are simply not offered when you edit one.

A credit card can also be off-budget. That suits a card you keep only for emergencies, or one you are slowly paying down on its own and rarely reach for. It still gets a payment envelope, so you can set money aside for the payment whenever you like, without the card being part of your everyday budgeting.

Covering overspending

You will go over in an envelope sometimes, and that is fine. Envelop treats it as a small decision to make, not a failure. When an envelope goes negative it turns red, and a banner appears at the top of your budget telling you how much you are over across all your envelopes.

To fix it, click the red envelope and click Cover. Choose where to pull the money from, either another envelope that has room to spare or your unassigned To allocate, and click Cover. You do not type an amount: Envelop covers exactly what you went over, automatically, so the envelope goes back to zero and the money comes out of wherever you chose. That is the whole idea behind envelopes: when life does not match the plan, you move money around and keep going, instead of throwing the budget out. There is more in covering overspent envelopes.

Rollover and moving between months

Your budget is organized by month. To move between months, click the month name at the top of the Budget screen and pick another one. You can look back to see exactly where you stood, or look ahead and even assign money into a future month before it arrives.

By default, whatever is left in an envelope at the end of a month rolls into the next month, which is how cushions and savings envelopes build up over time. If you would rather an envelope start fresh each month instead of carrying a balance, click the envelope, click Edit, and turn off its rollover setting. Rent is a common one to do this with, since last month's rent money has no reason to hang around.

If you forget to enter something and add it with an older date, Envelop updates every month after it correctly, so backdating a purchase never leaves your numbers wrong.

Reconciling with your bank

Reconciling is how you check that Envelop matches your bank. It is worth doing every week or two, and it keeps small mistakes from piling up into a budget you stop trusting.

To do it, open the Accounts screen, click the account you want to check, and click Reconcile. Enter the balance your statement shows, exactly as it reads. You do not have to work out whether it is positive or negative; Envelop handles that for you, treating a checking or savings balance as money you have and a credit card balance as money you owe. Then tick off the transactions that have actually cleared. As you tick them, the difference shown at the top moves toward zero, and once it reaches zero the account matches your statement and you can finish. If the difference will not reach zero, a transaction is probably missing, entered wrong, or should not be there, so the best move is to track it down and fix it.

When you truly cannot find it, though, you do not have to leave the account stuck. A Create adjustment button appears showing the leftover amount. Clicking it posts a small labeled transaction, called Reconciliation adjustment, that squares the account to your statement and finishes the reconcile. It sits in your register like any other transaction, so you can see it and delete it later if the real cause turns up. Treat it as a last resort: if you reach for it often, that is a sign a transaction is regularly going missing or getting entered twice. On a checking or savings account the adjustment settles into your To allocate, so extra money becomes yours to assign and a shortfall comes out of what is waiting there. On a credit card it simply changes what you owe, and leaves the rest of your budget alone.

Reports

Reports turn all those little entries into the bigger picture, and you do not have to set anything up. They are built from the transactions you are already entering. That is the quiet payoff of entering things yourself: by the time you open this screen, the data is already honest.

At the top right you choose how far back to look, from three months out to two years, or year to date. That choice applies to the whole screen at once. Each report is a card you can collapse by clicking its header, so you can close the ones you do not care about and keep the screen down to what you actually use.

Are you living within your means

• Income vs Spending is the headline answer, averaged across the period you picked.
• Net Savings Trend plots what was left over each month, so you can see whether the gap is widening or closing.
• Monthly Breakdown is the same thing as a table, month by month, when you want the actual numbers rather than a shape.

Where the money actually went

• Spending by Category breaks the period down across all your groups.
• Top Envelopes by Spending ranks your ten biggest, which is usually the faster route to a surprise.

How your plan held up

• Budgeted vs Actual shows where your plan and your real spending drifted apart. Persistent drift in one envelope usually means the plan is wrong, not that you keep failing.
• Envelope Funding Progress covers this month's envelopes that have targets, and how close each one is.
• Savings Goals gathers every active goal in one place, with how much is saved, how much is left, and which ones are on track or behind.

The longer view

• Net Worth adds up everything you own minus everything you owe, across every account including off-budget ones.
• Month over Month Comparison puts the same month side by side across every year in your budget. Useful for the months that are always expensive.
• Year over Year compares whole years of income, spending, and savings, and gets more useful the longer you have been at it.

Looking ahead

Cash Flow Forecast is the only report that looks forward. It projects your cash account balances over the next 30, 60, or 90 days using your scheduled recurring items, and tells you your balance today, where it is projected to bottom out, and where it lands at the end. That projected low is the number worth watching, because that is the moment the month gets tight.

It is worth knowing how this differs from the calendar, since the two sound similar. The calendar answers "is this particular bill funded in its envelope." The forecast answers "does my bank balance dip below zero before payday." You can be fully funded on paper and still have the money arrive after the bill does, and the forecast is what catches that.

Sharing your budget

Envelop lets you share one budget with the people you handle money with, most often a partner. Everyone is on the same budget and sees the same envelopes, so no single person is the sole keeper of the numbers. That is the whole point of sharing: instead of one person reading the budget and everyone else taking their word for it, you all look at the same thing.

To invite someone, go to the Settings screen and find the Members section. Under Invite someone by email, enter their email address and send the invite. They get an invitation to join, set up their own login, and see the budget right alongside you. You can invite up to four other people, and it does not cost anything extra.

Everyone you invite can view and edit the shared budget: add transactions, fund envelopes, and see exactly where things stand. Only you, as the budget's owner, can invite or remove people. You can remove a member from that same Members section whenever you need to, and a member can also choose to leave the budget on their own.

Installing Envelop on your phone

Envelop runs in a browser, so there is nothing you have to install to use it. But you can install it, and on a phone you probably should. Once you do, it gets its own icon on your home screen, opens in its own window with no address bar across the top, appears in your app switcher alongside everything else, and lands straight on your budget when you tap it. In daily use there is very little to tell it apart from any other app on your phone.

How you install it depends on the device.

iPhone and iPad

This one has to be done in Safari, and iOS will not offer it to you, so it is worth knowing the steps.

1. Open app.getenvelop.app in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button, the square with an arrow pointing up, at the bottom of the screen.
3. Scroll down the list and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add.

Two things that catch people out. It has to be Safari, so if you are using Chrome or Firefox on your iPhone the option will not appear. And if you arrived here by tapping a link inside another app, like a message or an email, you may be in that app's own built-in browser rather than Safari. Look for an option to open the page in Safari first.

One more thing to expect, and it is not a fault in Envelop. iPhone treats a home screen app as completely separate from Safari, right down to keeping its own cookies. So the first time you open Envelop from your home screen you will be asked to sign in one more time, even though you were already signed in a moment earlier in Safari. Sign in once there and it stays signed in from then on.

Android

Chrome will usually offer to install Envelop on its own after you have used it a couple of times, and you can simply accept. If you would rather not wait, open the browser menu and choose Install app, or Add to Home screen depending on your version.

Computer

Chrome and Edge show a small install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar. Click it and Envelop opens in its own window, without browser tabs, which is a nicer way to work through a paycheck on a laptop.

Updates take care of themselves

There is no update button and nothing to check. Envelop updates itself in the background, so the next time you open it you are on the current version. This is one of the genuine advantages of installing from the browser rather than from a store: there is no review queue between a fix and you.

You will not find Envelop in the App Store or on Google Play, and that is on purpose. Installing from the browser is the whole process.

Settings

The Settings screen is where you tell Envelop how you want it to behave. Most of it you will set once and forget, but one setting is worth getting right on day one.

Time zone

Your budget has a time zone, and it decides when your day actually ends. That sounds like a small thing and it is not. It is what determines when a bill counts as due, when a goal's daily target resets, and when a paycheck you dated for tomorrow becomes money you are allowed to assign. Set it wrong and the app rolls over into tomorrow while it is still today for you, and the numbers you are looking at stop matching your life without ever looking wrong.

Search for your city in the Time zone box and pick it. Underneath, Envelop shows you the current time there, which is the quickest way to confirm you chose the right one: if it does not match the clock on your wall, try again. If you are on a new device Envelop offers to use that device's zone as a shortcut.

One deliberate detail: your budget stays on the zone you chose, not on wherever you happen to be. Take a trip overseas and your budget still turns over at midnight at home, which is almost certainly what you want. Actually move somewhere new, and you change it here.

Currency and date format

Pick the currency your budget is kept in, and whether dates read as MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, or YYYY-MM-DD. Both are searchable lists, and both apply everywhere in the app.

Appearance

Choose Dark or Light. It takes effect immediately.

Everything else on this screen

You can rename your budget at the top. Account is where you change your password. Members is where you invite and manage the people you share with, covered in sharing your budget. Data holds Export budget data and Restart or import budget, both covered in backup and restore. Subscription shows your plan and billing.

Importing your budget

If you are coming from another app, you do not have to start over. When you first set up Envelop, or later from Settings if you choose to start fresh, you can bring your data in from YNAB or Actual. Export your data out of them (each one gives you a file), choose Import from YNAB or Import from Actual in Envelop, and upload it. Envelop turns your accounts, categories, and transactions into its own envelopes and history. Coming from Goodbudget works too.

Importing replaces whatever budget you currently have, on purpose, so it is a clean switch rather than a merge into what is already there. The step-by-step is in importing from YNAB and Actual and switching from Goodbudget.

Backup and restore

Your budget belongs to you, and you can take it with you any time. On the Settings screen, click Export budget data to download your entire budget, every account, envelope, transaction, and goal, as a single file. That file is a real backup and a clean way to move your data somewhere else.

To bring a budget back, import that file the same way you would import from another app, and your whole budget returns exactly as it was. Because Envelop never touches your bank directly, this export is also your peace of mind: your financial life stays in your hands, and you can pick it up and take it anywhere.