Budgets and savings
Budgets
A budget in Clatri is set on an account from the chart of accounts. Not on a category — accounting categories no longer exist. The screen says it in one line: "What you plan to spend, per account".
The change isn't cosmetic. Before, you budgeted against a tag that lived apart from your bookkeeping; now you budget against the same account where your expenses are actually recorded. That's why the budget number and the report number can never disagree: they're the same number, read from the ledger.
Where it lives
Budgets is a screen of its own. You get to it from the top bar of the chart of accounts — which is where it makes sense to look for it, next to the accounts you're going to budget.
Creating a budget
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Account | The expense account you want to control. You pick it from the chart of accounts |
| Amount | How much you plan to spend on that account per period |
| Currency | The currency the plan is defined in. You can budget in any of the currencies the entity actually uses |
| Repeats | Every month |
| Include subaccounts | Whether the budget also counts what the child accounts spend |
Once created, the account can't be changed. If you picked the wrong account, you delete the budget and create the right one — moving a plan from one account to another would rewrite the history of what you've already spent against it.
Include subaccounts
This checkbox is the payoff of having a hierarchy. The app explains it without any accounting jargon:
"A budget on Marketing also counts what you spend on Advertising and Content."
You can budget an account that only groups others — it doesn't have to be an account where movements are recorded directly. You budget Marketing once and capture the whole branch, instead of keeping three budgets you have to add up yourself. The parent account resolves its own subtree, so an expense in Advertising is never counted twice.
When the budget pulls in its branch, the card says so: Includes subaccounts.
Budget vs actual
Each card shows a progress bar and a line read in two ways:
- "{spent} of {budget}" — how much you've spent against what you planned
- "{amount} left" — what remains, or
- "{amount} over" — how much you went over
Going over budget is a fact, not an error: the bar fills up, turns red, and the number tells you exactly by how much. There's no scolding and no escalating alarm.
The actual figure isn't calculated in the app. The ledger answers it. That's why every expense you record — by chat, by statement, by open banking or by hand — updates the count without you doing anything, and why the agent and the screen always say the same thing. If you ask it "how am I doing on the marketing budget?", it reads from the same source.
Multiple currencies
If your entity moves more than one currency, the screen filters by currency and you choose which one you're looking at. A budget lives in one currency: it isn't converted or mixed with another.
Deleting a budget
Deleting a budget doesn't touch anything else:
"The account and its movements stay exactly as they are. Only the budget goes."
A budget is a plan, not a journal entry. Deleting it removes the plan and leaves the bookkeeping intact.
Savings pockets
Savings pockets are separate portions of an account's balance. They're not new accounts — they're divisions inside an existing account.
If your main account has 10,000, you can create a "Vacation" pocket with 2,000 and another "Emergency" one with 1,000. Your available balance becomes 7,000, but the total in the bank is still 10,000. The money doesn't move anywhere — you simply mark it as reserved for a purpose.
Goals
Each pocket can have a target amount. If your vacation goal is 5,000 and you've saved 2,000, you see the progress. You can tell the agent "transfer 500 to the vacation pocket" and the available balance drops while the pocket rises.
Interest
If your savings account generates interest, you can configure the rate on the pocket — monthly or annual, simple or compound. Clatri calculates and applies interest automatically per the configured frequency, just like with investments.
Transfers
Moving money between the available balance and a pocket is an internal transfer. It doesn't affect the total in the bank, it just redistributes between available and savings. You can do it from chat:
- "Move 300 to the emergency pocket"
- "Take 100 out of vacation savings"
When savings come from the bank
If the transfer to your savings arrives through a statement or through open banking, Clatri sees that money left your account but can't know which pocket it was going to. That movement doesn't make up a destination: it sits in a bridge account and waits in the To assign tray until you connect it to the real pocket.
Connecting it doesn't create a second movement. The money already left the account when the bank reported it; assigning it only says where it went. Putting money in a pocket isn't an expense either — it doesn't touch your Income statement, it just moves an asset from one side of your Balance sheet to the other.