User guide

Bufy user guide

A complete walkthrough of Bufy — from your first login to advanced features like multi-period planning, category allocations, credit sources and investments. Written for end users, no accounting background required.

The philosophy behind Bufy
Bufy exists to answer three daily questions: how much can I spend right now, what do I still have to pay, and am I still on track? Unlike traditional budget apps, Bufy does not force you to pick a single budgeting method. Its underlying engine works the same whether you follow Anti-Budget, 50/30/20, Zero-Based, Envelope, Pay Yourself First, or Kakeibo — the method you already use simply determines how you choose to organise your categories and recurring expenses. Everything else (weekly rolling allocations, overspend carryover, free-to-spend calculations) happens automatically. The numbers you see on the dashboard are always recalculated from your real transactions, so there is no manual reconciliation step: enter a purchase, and every balance, allocation and projection updates immediately.
What this guide covers
  1. 1. Getting started — first 10 minutes
  2. 2. The dashboard — reading the numbers
  3. 3. Transactions — the daily habit
  4. 4. Budgeting methods — how each one maps to Bufy
  5. 5. Investments
  6. 6. Settings that matter
1. Getting started — first 10 minutes

The fastest path to a usable dashboard is to enter one income source, one or two recurring expenses, and leave everything else at defaults. You can refine later.

Bufy is invite-only. Paste your invite code on the register screen together with your email and a strong password. Your account is immediately bound to an encrypted personal database schema — no other user, not even an administrator, can read your financial data. Set a memorable password: it is also the key that unwraps your data encryption key on every login, so there is no password reset that preserves data. A forgotten password means your encrypted data is unrecoverable (this is a security feature, not a bug).

2. The dashboard — reading the numbers

The dashboard is intentionally dense. Every tile answers a specific question you would otherwise have to compute manually.

The large headline amount is your real discretionary money for the selected interval (daily / weekly / monthly). It is computed as: total income for the current period, minus all still-unpaid recurring expenses, minus planned savings allocations, minus any category overspend already incurred, divided across the time left until your next payday. Overspend in one category is absorbed into the next day's free-to-spend (not the overspent category itself), so you never see a negative 'daily' number — it just reduces tomorrow's allowance.

3. Transactions — the daily habit

Entering transactions as they happen is the one daily habit Bufy asks of you. Everything else is calculated for you.

Click the + button on the dashboard. Enter the amount, choose a category (or leave blank), optionally add a description, and save. The transaction is timestamped to today by default — change the date if you are logging something that happened yesterday. If the category has an allocation and you are about to overspend it, the app warns you before saving so you can either proceed or change your mind.

4. Budgeting methods — how each one maps to Bufy

Bufy does not have a 'method selector'. Instead, the way you choose to configure categories and allocations determines which method you are practising. Here is how to configure the app for each of the six major methods.

Skip category allocations entirely. Add only your salary and your recurring expenses. Bufy will compute free-to-spend from income minus bills minus savings and you simply spend that amount freely. Recommended for people who dislike tracking and want a single number to follow.

5. Investments

Bufy tracks investment positions alongside your budgeting, so your total financial picture is in one place.

Go to Investments and create a new holding (a stock, ETF, index fund, crypto, or custom instrument). Set its name and initial purchase amount. Bufy does not fetch live prices — it is a manual tracker designed to be bank-independent and privacy-preserving — so you update the current value when you want an accurate snapshot.

6. Settings that matter

Most defaults are good. These are the ones worth knowing about.

Choose whether the dashboard emphasises daily, weekly or monthly budgeting by default. Weekly is the most common choice.

Troubleshooting