Questions

No. It's a calculator, not an adviser. Nothing it shows — categories, charts, budget guidelines, the hours-you'd-need-to-work figure — is financial, investment, tax, accounting or legal advice. Speak to a qualified professional before making decisions about your money.

.csv, .xlsx and .xls exports from your bank, card issuer or accounting software, up to 12 at a time — plus JSON files the app itself exported, so you can pick up a sheet on another device.

No. There is nothing to sign up for, because there's nowhere to sign up to. The app has no server and no user records.

Nowhere. Your file is read in the browser tab you have open. If you save a sheet, it goes into that browser's own storage on that device — not to us. We have no copy and no way to retrieve one, which also means we can't recover anything for you.

Yes, and the password never leaves your device either — it isn't stored, only held in memory while the sheet is open. That has a consequence worth understanding: if you forget it, the sheet cannot be recovered by us or by anyone. Treat it as a lock against someone casually using your computer, not as protection against a determined attacker.

Good enough to save most of the work, and wrong often enough that you should look. Merchant names it recognises are usually right. Anything it doesn't recognise is left for you, and what you choose is suggested for the rest of that sheet. Totals depend entirely on what your bank exported and how the columns were mapped, so check anything you plan to act on.

Each one is a widely used affordability benchmark rather than anything we invented.

Housing — 30%

The 30% figure comes from federal housing policy. The maximum affordable rent for federally subsidized housing was set at 20% of income in the 1940s, raised to 25% in 1969, and raised again to 30% in 1981. That threshold spread beyond subsidized rentals and became the general U.S. affordability standard for owned housing too. HUD classifies a household spending more than 30% of its income on housing as cost burdened, and more than 50% as severely cost burdened. The reasoning behind the line is that whatever is left after housing has to cover every other non-discretionary cost — food, transportation, health care.

Consumer guidance uses the same number for renters, and mortgage lenders use a close cousin of it: the 28/36 rule, which caps housing costs at 28% of gross monthly income and total debt payments at 36%.

We count rent or mortgage, home or renter's insurance, and utility bills against the 30%. Utilities belong there: HUD measures cost burden against gross rent, which is rent plus utilities.

Vehicle — 10%

The 10% comes from the 20/4/10 rule for buying and financing a car: put 20% down, finance for no more than four years, and keep transportation costs at or below 10% of your monthly income. Note what the 10% covers — not the loan payment alone, but insurance, fuel and maintenance as well, which is why we total your whole vehicle spend rather than the car payment on its own. Other guidance puts the ceiling slightly higher, at 10–15% of take-home pay.

Savings — 15%

Both Fidelity and T. Rowe Price recommend saving at least 15% of your income each year for retirement, including any employer match. Fidelity's age-based milestones — 1× your salary saved by 30, 3× by 40, 6× by 50, 8× by 60 and 10× by 67 — assume that 15% rate starting at age 25. T. Rowe Price ties its 15% figure to the possibility of a retirement lasting 30 years or more.

One thing to know about how savings is measured here: it is what is left after your spending, not money you moved into a savings account. Transfers between your own accounts are left out of both sides, so moving money between them counts as neither income nor an expense.

Whichever you tell it to use — and it starts on post-tax.

The housing and savings rules are written against gross, pre-tax income. The car rule is cited both ways: 10% of monthly income in one place, 10–15% of take-home pay in another.

The calculator doesn't read an income figure off your statements. It works from an hourly wage and a weekly hours figure, and multiplies those into a monthly income. It seeds the wage from your deposits — what came in, divided by the hours that period would take at a 40-hour week — but the wage and the hours are both yours to change.

Leave them alone and the answer is deliberately conservative, because deposits are usually net pay and a smaller income makes every threshold stricter. If your housing comes in under 30% of that, it is comfortably under 30% of your gross income too. Set the wage to your actual gross rate and you get exactly what the rules intend.

Why it doesn't work your gross income out for you: going backwards from deposits needs your filing status, your state, your pre-tax deductions and your withholding elections. Guessing at those produces a number that looks precise and isn't — and every error would point the same way, towards telling you that you can afford more than you can. Better to start conservative and let you correct it.

No, and it never will ask for your banking credentials. You export the file yourself and bring it to the app.

It's free, with no paid tier. The site carries advertising on pages like this one. The ads are contextual — matched to the page's content, not to you, your identity or your activity on other sites. Ads have no access to your transactions.

Delete individual sheets from Sessions inside the app, or clear this site's storage in your browser to remove all of it at once. Either is immediate and complete, and neither requires asking us.

It runs, but it's built for a wider screen — categorizing a statement means a lot of rows and columns. A laptop or desktop is the better experience today.