All transactions from the financial accounts that you’ve connected to your Albert account are automatically categorized in order to generate a personalized monthly budget for you. Your budget is made up of four components:
- Income: recurring deposits are categorized as income and are also used to predict your future income transactions. If your income varies from paycheck to paycheck or you receive income in cash, you may add these transactions manually by going to the Income section and tapping on +.
- Recurring bills: similar to income, recurring charges are categorized as bills and used to predict upcoming charges. The Bills section shows a breakdown of your recurring bills—including subscriptions—that you've paid and that are coming up in the current month.
- Savings: funds that are set aside into your Albert Savings or transferred to other savings accounts are tallied in this section.
- Everything else: this includes all remaining funds spent that aren’t marked as bills. You can view your spending by date, merchant, or category.
Albert then calculates how much money you can safely spend at any given point in the month using this formula:
income - recurring bills - savings - everything else = left to spend
Funds moved between accounts are categorized as transfers and will not count towards recurring bills or everything else. For example, if you move money from your checking account to your IRA account, Albert will count that as a transfer rather than spending. Transfers to savings accounts are categorized as savings.
