User guide
Everything you need to understand envelope budgeting with Buckets — from the basics to corner cases like archiving, completing goals, and household sharing.
Buckets is an envelope budgeting app for households. The idea is simple: instead of looking at your bank balance and guessing whether you can afford something, you assign every pound or dollar a job before you spend it.
Think of it like the old envelope system — you'd label physical envelopes "Groceries", "Rent", "Holiday fund" and put cash in each. Buckets does the same thing digitally. Your money sits in accounts (your real bank accounts) and inside those accounts you create buckets (envelopes). Allocate money into buckets when you get paid, then spend from them throughout the month — your unallocated balance tells you exactly how much breathing room you have.
Everything is end-to-end encrypted. Buckets can't read your numbers — only you and your household can.
New to Buckets? Here's the five-step setup that gets you to a working budget in under ten minutes.
Create an account
Go to Accounts and add your first account — name it after the real bank account it represents (e.g. "Joint current account"). You can add as many accounts as you have real-world accounts.
Create buckets inside the account
On the Buckets screen, create a bucket for each spending category or goal — Rent, Groceries, Holiday fund, Emergency buffer. Choose Goalif there's a target amount, or Ongoing for recurring categories with no end date.
Record a deposit
When money arrives in your real account, add a Deposit transaction in Buckets for the same amount. This lands in Unallocated — money received but not yet assigned to any bucket.
Allocate to buckets
Tap Allocate money to this bucket on each bucket to move money from Unallocated into it. Do this until your unallocated balance is zero (or close to it). This is the core habit of envelope budgeting.
Spend from buckets
When you spend, add a Spendtransaction on the appropriate bucket. Watch the bucket balance decrease and your remaining envelope shrink. When a bucket hits zero, that category's money is gone for the month.
An account in Buckets represents a real-world bank account, savings pot, or physical location where money lives. Buckets doesn't connect to your bank — you enter transactions manually, which means you stay conscious of every pound and dollar.
Accounts come in two flavours:
Each account has its own unallocated balance — money deposited into that account that hasn't been put into a bucket yet.
Buckets are the envelopes inside an account. Each bucket has a name and a type:
Goal bucket
For saving towards a specific target — holiday, new laptop, emergency fund. Set a target amount and an optional deadline. Buckets tracks your progress as a percentage and shows how many days remain.
Ongoing bucket
For recurring categories with no end date — groceries, subscriptions, utilities. Set an optional monthly goalto track whether you're allocating the right amount each month.
When you create a bucket you'll also set a default split — what percentage of each allocation comes from each household member. This is just a default; you can override it on any individual transaction.
Every number in Buckets is a transaction. There are five types:
Deposit
Money arriving in a real account (salary, transfer in, interest). Lands in that account's Unallocated balance — waiting to be assigned to buckets.
Allocation
Assigning money from Unallocated into a bucket. Decreases the unallocated balance and increases the bucket balance. The core habit: do this whenever you get paid.
Spend
Money leaving a bucket (or unallocated). Record a spend whenever you make a real purchase. Requires a description so your history stays meaningful.
Transfer
Moving money between two buckets on the same account — for example, shifting leftover grocery money into your holiday fund. Both buckets must be on the same account.
Deallocation
The reverse of an allocation — money returned from a bucket back to Unallocated. You never create these manually; Buckets creates them automatically when you archive or delete a bucket that still has a balance.
A bucket moves through states over its lifetime. Understanding the transitions — especially what happens to money — prevents surprises.
Use this when you've reached (or decided to close out) a goal. The bucket enters a Completed state, shows 100% progress, and is hidden from the active allocation flow.
Three scenarios:
Archive a bucket to retire it without losing its history. When you archive:
You can reactivate an archived or completed bucket to bring it back to active status. The bucket reappears in your active list, ready to receive allocations again.
Delete is like archive but permanent. The same deallocation happens — remaining balance returns to Unallocated — but the bucket can't be recovered. Use delete when you're certain you won't need the history. Use archive when you're not sure.
Accounts have two states: Active and Archived. Unlike buckets, accounts can't be reactivated once archived.
Archiving an account is a cascade operation:
Hard-deleting an account is only allowed if it has zero transactions and zero non-deleted buckets — effectively a brand-new, unused account. Any account that has seen real use must be archived rather than deleted.
Buckets is designed for couples and households. One person creates the household; others join via an invite code found in Settings.
When a new member joins with the invite code, they land on a Pending access screen. An existing household member needs to approve the request — this step is required because of how end-to-end encryption works: the existing member cryptographically grants the new member access to the shared household key.
Once granted, the new member can see all shared accounts and buckets and add transactions. Personal accounts are visible only to their owner.
The default split on each bucket determines how allocations are attributed between members — for example 50/50 for a joint account, or 100% for a personal one. This affects reporting and insights, not the mechanics of how money moves.
All budget data — bucket names, account names, amounts, transaction descriptions — is encrypted on your device using AES-GCMbefore it's sent to our servers. We store ciphertext, not your numbers. Even if our servers were compromised, your budget would be unreadable.
Your encryption keys are derived from your password using PBKDF2. This means:
For the full legal detail see our Privacy Policy.
Where did my money go when I archived a bucket?
It went back to your account's Unallocated balance. Archiving a bucket creates a deallocation transaction that reverses the allocations, so your total account balance is unchanged — the money is just no longer assigned to that bucket. You can now allocate it to a different bucket.
Why does my reactivated bucket show 0 balance?
Because when the bucket was archived, its balance was released to Unallocated. Reactivating only changes the bucket's status back to active — it doesn't undo the deallocation. Go to the bucket and add a new allocation from your unallocated balance to get it funded again.
Can I un-archive an account?
Not currently. Account archiving is a one-way operation in the current version of Buckets. If you need to track money in that account again, create a new account with the same name and start fresh.
What's the difference between archiving and deleting a bucket?
Both release the remaining balance to Unallocated. The difference is history: archived buckets retain all their transaction history and appear in your History view. Deleted buckets are permanently removed and can't be recovered. When in doubt, archive.
I marked my goal as completed with less than the target — why does it show the wrong number?
After this is fixed in the latest version, when you mark a goal complete early, Buckets adjusts the target down to your actual collected balance. So if you saved £200 towards an £8,000 goal and marked it complete, the goal shown will be £200 — not £8,000. Make sure you're on the latest version of the app.
Do I lose my data if I forget my password?
Only if you also lost your recovery codes. Your recovery codes can unlock your account even without your password. If you have neither, the data is cryptographically inaccessible — even to us. This is the trade-off of end-to-end encryption. Save your recovery codes.
Why does a new household member see a 'Pending access' screen?
Because of how end-to-end encryption works. Each household has a shared encryption key. For a new member to read the encrypted data, an existing member must cryptographically hand over that key. Until an existing member approves the request in Settings, the new member can't decrypt anything. The approval is done in Settings → Household → Pending access requests.
Can I have multiple accounts?
Yes. Create one account for each real bank account or money location you want to track — current account, savings account, cash, etc. Each has its own bucket space and its own unallocated balance. Transfers between accounts aren't supported directly; record them as a spend on one and a deposit on the other.
Still have questions?
Use the Feedback button inside the app — we read every message.