Purpose
The budget planner helps you spot a comfortable monthly amount you might invest by reviewing income and outgoings - including irregular items.
You upload exports from your bank. We categorise transactions with merchant rules, then guess the rest from similar descriptions and (when configured) AI. Outgoings are rounded up to the nearest pound for a conservative estimate. You can recategorise, exclude anything you do not want in totals, and the monthly figures update.
What we parse
CSV files from most UK banks work, including common debit/credit column layouts. PDF text exports are supported with best-effort parsing; scanned image PDFs may not yield transactions.
We detect income, bills, subscriptions, food, transport, and other groups using merchant description rules, then fill gaps the way FreeAgent Guess does: copy a confident category onto similar merchants, then ask AI about anything still unclear. We also flag recurring payments where they are likely to be regular. You can recategorise and exclude any rows before you export the results.
Privacy by design
Statement upload processing happens in server memory for your session. We do not store statement files or sell your data. Unclear merchant names may be sent to OpenAI to suggest a category.
If you are signed in, the latest categorised entries and budget figures are saved to your account so you can reopen them from the planner or your profile. You can export a PDF or Excel expenditure analysis to share with an adviser. If you are not signed in, close the page or start over and nothing from your upload persists on our servers.
From savings to a what-if
When you have a monthly figure you are comfortable with, use the link to open the investment calculator with a sensible long-term example. That closes the loop between "what might be left?" and "what could it have become historically?" - still not advice, but a clearer picture.
