Accounts

Accounts are where your money physically lives; the budget is the plan laid over them. Budgero keeps that distinction sharp — which is why picking the right account type matters more than it first appears.

Account types

Type	Kind	Budget participation
Checking	Asset	Always on-budget
Savings	Asset	Always on-budget
Cash	Asset	Always on-budget
Credit Card	Liability	Your choice
Loan	Liability	Your choice
Mortgage	Liability	Always off-budget
Investment / Retirement	Asset	Always off-budget
Real Estate / Other Asset	Asset	Always off-budget

On-budget accounts feed your budget: their money shows up in Ready to Assign and their spending hits categories. Off-budget (tracking) accounts contribute to net worth but stay out of the envelope math — you don't budget your retirement fund's market swings.

Credit cards and loans are flexible: on-budget if you want Budgero's debt machinery managing payments and payoff (see Debt tracking), off-budget if you only want the balance tracked.

Starting balances

When you create an account with a balance, Budgero records it as an opening transaction so the books balance from day one:

• Asset accounts get an inflow ("Initial Balance") that lands in Income — meaning your existing money becomes assignable immediately.
• Debt accounts can record both the total borrowed and what you've already paid, so the balance reflects what you actually owe today.

Multi-currency accounts

Any account can be denominated in any of 168 currencies, independent of your budget currency. For a foreign-currency account, each transaction stores two amounts: the original (what actually happened, in the account's currency) and the converted value (what your budget sees), along with the exchange rate used.

Rates resolve in a defined order:

1. Custom rates you've pinned to a date range — useful when you moved money at a known rate.
2. Fetched rates — Budgero retrieves month-averaged rates automatically.
3. Manual rates you've entered — these also make multi-currency work fully offline and on self-hosted setups without a rate API.
4. Adjacent month fallback when nothing else covers the date.

You can also override the rate on any individual transaction — the right tool when your card's actual settlement rate differs from the market average and you want the converted amount to match your statement to the cent.

Reconciliation

Reconciling is the habit that keeps a manual-first budget trustworthy: comparing Budgero's balance against your bank's and confirming they agree.

1. Open the account and compare its balance to your bank app or statement.
2. If they differ, find the gap — usually a missed transaction, a duplicate, or a pending charge the bank hasn't settled.
3. Add an adjustment transaction if a small discrepancy isn't worth archaeology.
4. Reconcile the account — Budgero marks all transactions up to that date as reconciled and stamps the account with the reconciliation time.

Reconciled transactions are your verified history; the stamp tells you how fresh that verification is. Weekly reconciliation takes about two minutes per account. Monthly works too. "Never" is how manual budgets die — see Ready to Assign for how unreconciled drift shows up in your numbers.

Closing an account

Accounts are archived, not deleted. An archived account disappears from pickers and day-to-day lists, but every transaction it ever held stays in your reports and history — close your old bank account without losing five years of records. Archiving is reversible; unarchive it and it returns exactly as it was.

Before archiving, bring the balance to zero (transfer remaining funds to another account) so your net worth and Ready to Assign aren't carrying a ghost balance.