How to set up Ace Budget: your first budget in one sitting

You can set up Ace Budget in about twenty minutes, and you don't need any history to do it. The app starts from the money you have today, so there's nothing to reconstruct and nothing to catch up on. Here's the whole path, from signing in to a first month where every dollar has a job you gave it.

What to have ready before you set up Ace Budget

Three things make the twenty minutes smooth:

• Your bank login, if you plan to connect accounts. Ace Budget uses Plaid, and the connection is read-only: it can see balances and transactions, and it can never move money. Your bank password isn't stored by Ace Budget at all.
• Your next paycheck: roughly how much, and when it lands.
• A rough list of bills with due dates. Rent or mortgage, utilities, phone, insurance, minimum debt payments.

If you don't have the bank login handy, skip the connection for now. You can add accounts manually and connect later.

The four onboarding steps

Sign in with Google and Ace Budget walks you through four screens.

1. Welcome. A short explanation of the idea: assign every dollar, save toward what matters, and aim to spend last month's income rather than this week's.
2. Connect Your Accounts. Press "Connect with Plaid" to link checking, savings, credit cards, or loans. Balances and transactions pull in on their own from here on. You can also skip this step and add accounts manually later from the Accounts screen.
3. Roughly, what comes in? Enter your monthly take-home pay after tax. An estimate is fine; the app gets exact once your transactions sync.
4. Here's a starter budget. Ace Budget lays out a set of categories with monthly targets based on rough averages. These are targets to aim at, not money that has been assigned, and they are not your numbers yet. Savings goals start empty on purpose, because only you know what a trip or a rainy-day fund should cost.

After the fourth step you start the 60-day free trial. A card goes on file and nothing is charged until day 61; you can cancel from inside the app at any point.

Make the starter budget yours

You land on the Budget screen. Spend five minutes here before assigning anything:

• Rename categories to match how you actually think about money. "Dining" might be "Takeout" for you.
• Trim targets that don't fit. The starter numbers are averages; yours are usually lower in some places and higher in others.
• Delete what doesn't apply. No car, no car category.
• Add what's missing with "New category." This is where the irregular bills go: car insurance, the holidays, the water heater you know is coming. Give each one a target with the amount and the date it's due, and the app works out the monthly share for you.

Don't aim for perfect. A budget you adjust for three months ends up far more accurate than one you agonize over on night one.

Assign your first dollars

Now look at Ready to Assign at the top of the Budget screen. It's the money sitting in your accounts that hasn't been given a purpose yet. Because it is anchored to your real balances, it can't be a number you hope is true.

Work down the list in priority order:

1. Bills due before your next paycheck first. Assign what each one needs.
2. Groceries and gas to get you to that paycheck.
3. Minimum debt payments.
4. Then targets: "Fill to monthly" on a category assigns this month's share of its target in one tap; "Fill to full target" assigns the whole thing if you can afford it.

Stop when Ready to Assign reads zero. If it hits zero before everything is funded, that's not a failure; that's the honest picture, and the next paycheck picks up where this one left off. If you have money left over, give it a job too, even if the job is "spending money."

Set up one paycheck rule

This is the step that makes the second month easier than the first. Open Settings → Rules & Automation and add an income rule. Each rule says what to do with a deposit the moment it arrives: a fixed amount to rent, a percentage to savings, or "to target" for a category with a goal, in the order you choose. The next time your paycheck lands, the split happens for you and Ready to Assign shows only what's left to decide.

The same screen holds auto-categorization rules. You rarely need to write one by hand: when you change a transaction's category, Ace Budget offers to always categorize that merchant the same way, and one tap saves the rule. From then on, adding a transaction for that merchant fills the category in for you.

Your weekly five minutes

From here the routine is small:

• Transactions. New activity arrives on its own if you connected a bank. Glance through, give each one a category, and split any purchase that covered more than one thing.
• Reconcile. Once a week, open the Reconcile screen, compare each account's cleared balance with the bank, and mark it reconciled. Drift never gets more than a few days old.
• Reflect. When you want to see where the money went, the Reflect screen shows monthly income against spending, with transfers between your own accounts left out so the picture is honest.

On a phone, the same screens sit behind the Budget, Activity, Reports, Money and More tabs.

If you share money with someone, Settings is also where you invite them. A partner joins free on your subscription and sees the shared budget; you choose which of your accounts' cards and balances they see.

That's the whole setup. Twenty minutes, four steps, one rule. The 60-day trial is long enough to live through two full paychecks and see whether the calm sticks.