Week of August 17, 2026

A phone budget, and envelopes that fund themselves

The budget now has a screen built for a phone, and the ledger shows which Venmo requests and charges are still outstanding. Search takes either-or conditions and parentheses, and an envelope can name the account its money arrives in and be funded from whatever landed there.

Your budget, on your phone

Opening the budget on a phone gave you the desktop page at phone width: the category names off the side of the screen, the three figures at the top printed over each other, and a bar offering keyboard shortcuts on a device with no keyboard. There is now a budget screen built for the phone, and a phone goes to it. Envelopes are grouped and readable, tapping Available assigns to that envelope, and Fund every target covers the underfunded ones in one press.

The other two phone screens caught up with it. The ledger can reach Reconciled and the recycle bin, which had been desktop-only, and its dates sit in a narrow leading column instead of a full-width band per day, so nine rows fit on a screen where six did. The review card now carries the same actions as a ledger row, including Split with a payee: the offsetting row that writes appears as its own card underneath, with its own charge action, so splitting a bill and charging for it is two taps without leaving the screen.

Venmo requests and charges, marked in the ledger

The Venmo integration now reaches into the ledger itself. Looking at a Venmo row, there was no way to tell whether you had already asked for the money back, short of opening Venmo in another tab and comparing by eye. A row whose payee and amount match a request still open on Venmo now carries a Requested pill, and hovering it names the charge: the amount, who owes it, the day you sent it, and the note. Charges somebody sent you are marked the same way and read You owe, so which way the money goes is a word rather than a color. One charge covering several rows marks all of them, and where more than one open charge could be the match, the pill says how many instead of picking one.

Getting to Venmo is shorter too. Charge on Venmo opens in a panel tucked into the corner of the app window rather than a full browser tab, so the row the charge came from stays readable beside it and closing the panel leaves the ledger where you left it. The extension's own list of who owes you runs the ledger's search grammar rather than a plain text scan, so the amounts, comparators, date windows and field prefixes you use in the ledger work there as well.

The marks come from the Venmo browser extension, which keeps that list in your browser. Ember's servers never receive it. A request that gets paid simply stops being marked.

Search for one condition or another

The search box could say one term with several values, payee:a|b, but not either of two whole conditions. It now takes or between conditions, and parentheses to group them, so (SB date:2021) or 2026-02 finds what it reads as. Groups nest, a minus sign in front of one negates the whole group, and not binds tighter than a space, which binds tighter than or, so most queries need no parentheses at all. The word and is accepted and ignored, so typing it can no longer turn into a search for the word itself.

Fund an envelope from the account its money arrives in

An envelope can now name the account its money lands in, and the assign panel has a new basis, Funded by account, that offers whatever arrived there during the period you are looking at. Press it and the envelope is assigned that figure, the same as any other assignment.

The case it is built for is the dedicated account: a separate checking account that takes the rent slice of a paycheck and pays the rent out again, and does nothing else. So the figure is every inflow to that account rather than only the income to it, because a transfer from the account your paycheck actually lands in is the most common way a dedicated account gets funded, and an income-only reading would report nothing for exactly the person this exists for. Envelopes with no rule of their own are skipped rather than assigned zero, so running the basis over a whole selection cannot empty the rest of your budget.

Quality of life improvements

• Speed: Edits land on the keystroke rather than on the round trip. A category pick closes the editor as you make it, approving a row answers the review count immediately, and matching rows inside a search no longer freezes the ledger for several seconds. Paging through statement months is quick on a long history, the Net Worth report is drawn in one pass instead of one per month, and the site holds up better with several tabs open at once.
• Budget: Money fields take arithmetic the way the ledger's do, pressing an operator key on a row keeps the balance already in the envelope and adds to it, each assign basis has a key of its own and acts on the row your cursor is on, compact density is now actually compact, and the go-to chord for the Budget is g b, with Balances moving to g e.
• Ledger: Every bulk action hands its rows back highlighted rather than ticked, so the next batch starts without pressing Escape first, keys act on that whole band, and the selection controls stay up while it is showing. Sidebar sections open the ledger scoped to themselves, including Closed accounts. Move to account opens the same account picker used everywhere else, in a flyout beside the menu, with the filter box already focused. Del deletes the row your cursor is on, and a reversed copy is marked in its memo so the pair reads apart. Notices appear in the top bar instead of over the account balances, the ledger keeps its right edge after a window resize, and it no longer says "No matches" over a list that is still loading.
• Keyboard: Space ticks the row your cursor is on rather than the last one you clicked, the detail drawer opens for that row too, PageUp, PageDown and End work after a scroll, and pressing a column key inside the detail panel opens that field. Escape reverts the field you are typing in first and closes the panel second, and it closes the budget's ledger drawer from inside it. The Ledger takes g l and Tags takes g t.
• Search: Memo joins the field menus, a transfer can be searched by the account on the other side of it, and a row in several related sets can search any one of them from its own chain. A link carrying a sort order now takes effect when you follow it from inside the app, rather than only on a fresh load.
• Reconciliation: You can reconcile without approving or categorizing first. The button says how many rows are unapproved and locks them as they are, and the review count still holds them afterwards. Changing a transaction's own date on a reconciled row saves without a dialog, while the bank date is the one that asks. Rows that still need a category stay on screen after the lock rather than disappearing while the strip counts them, no row is left behind by a reconcile that took its neighbors, and the green tint on the Reconciliation cell reads the month you have open rather than the whole account.
• Matching: An import is matched as a whole rather than line by line, so the first record in a file stops taking a row a later one needed more. The search for a one-of-a-kind amount is capped at a year. One charge split across categories can be settled by several bank records, whether they land in one statement or spread across months, without unpicking the split first. Rows already claimed from a spreadsheet can be settled by the bank posting that covers them, and a bank record attaching to a row the bank has confirmed now clears it. Detaching a bank record asks whether to remove it or add it to the ledger as its own row, and either answer comes back with one undo.
• Import: Reverting an import describes what it will do to the ledger as it stands, rather than what the import did on the day it ran, which is often a larger number and sometimes nothing at all. The wait names the step it is on, holds the step list to one line at every width, and stops saying it is working while it is waiting on you. Venmo statements from 2021 import correctly, including account repayments, added funds and direct deposits.
• Categories: A category is inferred from the memo as well as the payee, so one person you pay often resolves groceries, utilities and a phone bill separately instead of taking a single guess for all three. Where the history is genuinely mixed, nothing is filled in and the payee reads Varies with the percentage, rather than a confident wrong answer that gets approved without a second look. A default you picked yourself survives a recompute, rows imported from a file take part for the first time, and the entry drawer says which rule categorized a row, or why none did.
• Investments: Saving a trade on a brokerage account works again, where a back-dated one could fail, and a trade you have just created appears without a reload. A ticker you type yourself picks up its company name, so it reads the way an imported holding does. Holdings count only the shares you still hold, and deleted rows are kept out of the reconciliation figures.
• Recycle bin: Rows carry the date you deleted them and the bin sorts on it, so what you deleted a minute ago is at the top rather than filed under the date it was spent. Related sets read correctly there, and Resurface works while a search is on.
• Reports: The Net Worth report and the All Accounts figure in the sidebar agree, where the same question had been answered four different ways.
• Edit history: The opening and closing balances you type into the statement strip are on the timeline, so they appear in the panel and Undo steps through them. An undo taken on the Balances page repaints the table in front of you, and each step says what it touched rather than only what it did.
• Actions: The actions page is now a console: every action in a rail down the left, the one you picked open beside it, each entry naming its effect and where the money goes. A split rule can create its transaction in an account you choose, which is usually the account the repayment will arrive in rather than the card the dinner went on.
• Extensions: A plan that includes an extension is no longer reported to it as a plan without one, which had put an upgrade prompt over a feature you already pay for. The Amazon and real estate extensions have proper toolbar icons.
• Scheduled transactions: Entering a scheduled transaction early, on the day its own cadence lands, no longer clears the schedule.