Using The App
Weekly is completely free to use to set up your budget and track your purchases manually. You can optionally paid to upgrade to Weekly PRO for access to more features such as automatic transaction syncing with your bank and credit cards. The Weekly PRO subscription costs $7.99 per month or $47.99 per year (50% discount).
Here’s a breakdown of different features in Weekly and Weekly PRO.
| Weekly | Weekly PRO | |
| Set Up Your Budget | Yes | Yes |
| Discover Your Safe-to-Spend | Yes | Yes |
| Track Your Purchases Manually | Yes | Yes |
| Use For Unlimited Number of Weeks | Yes | Yes |
| zically Download Transactions from Bank and Credit Cards | — | Yes |
| Set Up Funds To Track Savings Goals | — | Yes |
| Upcoming Bills Report | — | Yes |
| Cash Over Time Report | — | Yes |
| Cost | FREE | $7.99 / month or $47.99 / year |
There are two ways to add in your day-to-day purchases into Weekly:
- Manually
- Download them from your bank or credit card
Please see the post “Two Ways to Add Day-to-Day Transactions into Weekly” for full details.
We use a service called Plaid to sync transaction and account information from users’ financial institutions. Plaid handles all the authentication and Weekly only receives the financial information you choose to share. You can read all about Plaid security practices here: https://plaid.com/safety/
Since Plaid handles all the authentication, no login credentials are ever shared with Weekly. The only data we receive from Plaid is transaction and account data (like account names and balances). All data transferred from our servers to the Weekly app is encrypted over https connections.
Also, if you ever want to cancel, we can delete your data for you permanently — just send an email to [email protected].
If notifications are turned on, Weekly will send three types of notifications:
- Notifications when there are new transactions to review.
- Notifications when it is time to start a new week.
- Notifications if a transaction amount changes after it was posted (which happens occasionally with restaurants when tips are added later).
To turn on or off notifications, on your iPhone, go to Settings and tap Notifications. Select “Weekly” under Notification Style. Under Alerts, choose the alert style you want. If you’ve turned on Allow Notifications, you can choose when you want the notifications to be delivered – immediately or in the scheduled notification summary.
Weekly is currently available on iOS only. We hope to extend to other platforms in the future but don’t currently have a timeline for expanding.
If you’re just getting started with Weekly it’s possible that your checking account balance may be less than your Safe-to-Spend.
Weekly is a great way to get in sync with a partner or spouse. There is no extra charge to share your account with your spouse or partner.
Weekly is built with real-time data which allows you to log in to the same account on multiple devices and share your data.
If you signed up with your email address, simply share that email address login with your partner or spouse.
If you signed up with logins (Google, Facebook and Apple) you can add an email address to your account and share that email login and password with your spouse or partner. Here’s how to add an email address to an account that was created with a social login.
- Sign in with your social login (Google, Facebook or Apple)
- Go to Account and then hit “Add Email Login”. From there you can add an email and password. Tap “Add password login”.
- A success message will be displayed. Clicking “Done” shows the Profile page, the email icon next to the original social icon.
- You can login using the new email/password combination. Send this login to your partner or spouse.
See a demo of how to setup Weekly to share with a partner.
If your Weekly Spending Limit is in the negative, there are two situation that can make this occur:
You live off of irregular or lumpy income.
If your Weekly Spending Limit is too low or negative you may be dealing with “lumpy” income and using that to pay off your regular expenses. This is not necessarily a bad thing and there are a couple ways to handle this situation. You can …
- Deal with the negative amount until your lumpy income comes in and then add that to your Safe-to-Spend each time. You can also rollover any positive end-of-week balances to the next week.
- Estimate what you confidently think is a floor for your irregular income and add that as recurring income budget item. When the real amount of income comes in you can
- Update the recurring income item to be the current amount of the check. This will adjust your Safe-to-Spend in the current and future weeks.
- Don’t update the recurring item but then manually add an income transaction for the difference and add that to your Safe-to-Spend or a fund.
See more details in our article about how to handle variable income.
Your living situation is not sustainable
If your Weekly Spending Limit is too low or negative you may just not be in a sustainable financial situation. You need to reduce your regular expenses or increase your income or both.
You can change the date and week of credit card transactions but it does require an extra step. After you confirm a transaction you can tap into it from the dashboard page and change the date. If the date is in a previous week, Weekly will ask you if you’d like to move the transaction to that week, select “Move to [week dates]” and you’ll be all set.
Core Concepts
At the end of each week, you have the option to roll over your remaining Safe-to-Spend into the next week. The rollover is cumulative which helps ensure you are spending less than you earn on average.
If your Safe-to-Spend is positive, rolling over the remainder will increase your spending power for the following week. Turning off the rollover will keep the extra money safely in your bank account.
There are two types of expenses within Weekly – committed and day-to-day expenses.
An expense is considered “committed” if it happens at a regular interval for a known amount. Subscriptions, bills, and loan payments are examples of committed expenses. Savings goals are also considered committed expenses. Since these expenses are for a defined amount they’re easy to budget for.
Weekly takes your regular income and subtracts all of your committed expenses to discover your Weekly Spending Limit. Each week the amount of our Weekly Spending Limit is added to your Safe-to-Spend for the week. Your Safe-to-Spend is used to cover all your day-to-day expenses like groceries, gas, clothing, and entertainment.
Many budgeting apps ask you to estimate how much money you’ll spend on day-to-day expenses. We believe this approach adds unnecessary complexity to your budget. Instead Weekly has a single bucket for all of your day-to-day expenses – your Safe-to-Spend. At the beginning of each week, your Safe-to-Spend is increased by your Weekly Spending Limit so you can take budgeting one week at a time.
Regular income is the starting point for building a budget. It is simply the average amount of money available to cover all expenses. For many people, regular income is simply their net paycheck.
Even if you don’t have a regular paycheck (or any paycheck at all) you’ll still need to determine how much you can safely spend. If your income is irregular (from contract or “gig” work) it may be helpful to average your income over the past three months and start there. (Make sure to reduce this number by any taxes you’ll need to pay if they aren’t being deducted when you’re paid).
In some cases, you may have a one-off income like a birthday check or a bonus at work. You can add this income directly to your Safe-to-Spend just like you would add a day-to-day expense. Tap the plus button on the Dashboard and simply select “income” instead of “expense” at the top of the page.
Weekly is different from most other budgeting apps. Many other tools track your income and expenses month over month. Some apps provide a spending amount based on your checking account balance and upcoming bills and income.
Although these approaches have merit – we believe that budgeting can be simplified to better support our psychological patterns as humans. Using an average weekly Safe-to-Spend amount gives you the same amount of money to spend every week. This simple change helps create healthy patterns of regular spending and avoids the spending roller coaster that’s common when trying to tackle spending a whole month at a time.
Your Weekly Spending Limit amount is based on your regular income and committed expenses. Weekly uses these two numbers to calculate an average amount that can be spent each week, while still keeping enough money available for committed expenses like bills, loan payments, and savings.
To calculate this number we first have to find the average weekly amount for both your regular income and your committed expenses. Weekly takes the amount of each item and converts it to a weekly amount. For example, if you’re paid every two weeks, Weekly simply takes that income and divides it by two to get your weekly income.
Many bills, subscriptions, and loan payments are paid on a monthly basis. To convert a monthly amount to a weekly amount we divide by the average number of weeks per month which is 4.34524.
You can use this chart to convert any recurring transaction to a weekly amount.
| Frequency | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Weekly | None |
| Every two weeks | Divide by 2 |
| Twice a month | Multiply by 2 then divide by 4.34524 |
| Monthly | Divide by 4.34524 |
| Every x months | Divide by x then divide by 4.34524 |
After converting each bill or income item to a weekly amount, Weekly then subtracts the total income from total expenses. Voila! This is your weekly spending limit.
Weekly Spending Limit = Total weekly equivalent income – Total weekly equivalent committed expenses
Example Weekly Spending Limit Calculation
Let’s walk through a quick example budget so we can exemplify how the Weekly Spending Limit is calculated.
To keep it simple, we will have only three budget items.
| Budget Item | Amount and Frequency |
|---|---|
| Salary | $2,000 twice a month |
| Rent | $1,000 a month |
| Car payment | $375 a month |
Ok let’s start with income. You have a twice a month (bi-monthly) salary check of $2,000. First we find out how much that is per week.
$2,000 x 2 / 4.34524 = $920.54
So you are making the equivalent of $920.54 per week.
If you had more than one income, you would do the same type of calculation and then add them together to get your aggregated weekly equivalent income.
Now let’s tackle those two expenses (don’t I wish I had only two!) — they are $1,000 a month for rent and a $375 car payment.
Rent
$1,000 / 4.34524= $230.14
So you are spending the equivalent of $230.14 per week for rent.
Car Payment
$375 / 4.34524 = $86.30
So you are spending the equivalent of $86.39 per week for your car payment.
The next step is to add up all your weekly equivalent expenses to get a total weekly equivalent amount.
$230.14 + $86.30 = $316.44
To find your Weekly Spending Limit, you would simply the sum of all your weekly equivalent expenses from your weekly equivalent income.
$920.51 – $316.44 = $604.07
So the Weekly Spending Limit would be $604.07. This amount would be added to the Safe-to-Spend each week.
Special Note
You can see all the weekly averages of all your income and expense, pull up your budget (Tap menu, then “Budget”) and tap the “Group & sort” line and then under “Show amount in” select “Weeks”. Pretty cool!
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Learn more about why Weekly uses averages.
Syncing Transactions
Once you have discovered your weekly Weekly Spending Limit Weekly will prompt you to “Link An Account”. From there you choose your bank, add in your bank login info and then choose which accounts you will like to sync.
Weekly support 1,000s of banks and credit card accounts. Your bank is mostly likely supported. When you create your account, you will be prompted with search bar to search for you bank and you will be able to see if its supported before subscribing to Weekly.
Weekly supports automatically importing transactions from your financial institutions. We recommend you link any institutions that you use to spend money with. If you have other accounts with those institutions that don’t reflect spending (like business accounts or investment funds) you can easily disable those accounts.
We support syncing with over 11,500 institutions so you’ll be able to set up a connection with most institutions. Some institutions are not supported so transactions will need to be entered manually. Read more about why you may want to enter transactions manually even if you’ve linked your bank account. You can link up to 10 institutions at a time.
Transactions from major financial institutions (i.e. Chase or Citi) are usually downloaded two or three times per day. Smaller institutions may be updated less frequently. If you don’t see a transaction in Weekly after 48 hours, please reach out to our support team.
Absolutely. Inputting transactions manually is a great way to instantly update your Safe-to-Spend and keep you present when you’re spending money.
If your bank has not synced recently, here are some things to check.
- Check your sync history to see the last time your transactions were downloaded.
- Try using an on demand sync (If your bank has not synced in past 24 hours, your sync will be free.)
- If that doesn’t bring in new transactions, you may need to update your credentials.
- Go to Accounts > (The institution with a problem) > Update Credentials
If Weekly still does not download new transactions, it may be a problem with the bank or our integration partner Plaid. Please reach out us at by going to the “Contact Support” in the app or you go to contact support on the website and we will follow up with you.
Each time we download new transactions from your bank, we call this a “sync”.
Your sync history allows you to see the times your Weekly account has connected to your banks and downloaded transactions. This can be useful if you want to know if all your purchases have been downloaded into the app or if you just want to check on the health of your bank connection.
Sync History List
Sync history page shows a running list of the downloads that have happened between Weekly and your financial institution. Each entry will show the type of sync it was – “Scheduled” or “On Demand”, the number transactions that were downloaded and the time of the sync. There is also a check mark or an “X” to show if the sync was successful.
Sync Types
There are two types of syncs – “Scheduled” and “On demand”. Weekly automatically downloads your transactions for you based on what your bank allows by default. These are called “Scheduled” syncs. Each institution is different based on their policies.
But Weekly also allows you to sync when it’s most convenient to you. These syncs that are triggered by you are called “On Demand” sync. On demand syncing requires a sync credit which can be acquired a few different ways. [link to page describing on demand syncing]
If you used an “On demand” since there will also be a yellow box indicating how many credits were used.
How to see your Sync History
Your sync history is accessible in a couple places.
First, on the “On Demand Sync” page there is a clock icon. Tap on that icon to see the syncs from all institutions.
Second, you can go to your list of accounts. Underneath the name of the bank it will show you when the last sync occurred.
Tap on the institution and at the bottom of the screen underneath the “Manage” heading, you can see an option to see “Sync history”. Tap on that to see a list of syncs just for that institution.
Conclusion
Successful budgeting requires keeping in touch with your spending. Syncing with banks is a great way to make the inputting of transactions into Weekly easier and seeing a history of syncs can help you understand what has been downloaded into Weekly so you feel great about where you are at with your weekly spending.
Your linked financial institutions will sync periodically to pull in your latest transactions. The frequency of syncing is set by the bank but usually background syncs run a few times a day for most banks. However, there are times where you’d like to be able to sync transactions more frequently than your bank allows by default. Now you can.
On demand syncing allows you to pull your latest transactions when it’s most convenient for you.
Sync Credits
On demand sync is an add-on feature and requires having sync credits. You can acquire sync credits in several ways.
- You can purchase a pack of 5 credits for 99¢ and a pack of 40 for $4.99.
- If your bank has not synced in the last 24 hours, we will provide a free sync credit for that bank.
- You can earn sync credits by filling out our surveys about our product or submitting bug reports.
Additionally, when you first sign up for Weekly PRO, we will start you with 5 free credits so you can try it out.
Each time you sync an institution uses one sync credit. If your institution fails to sync, you will not be charged a credit.
Supported Banks
On demand syncing works for most financial institutions and there is no extra setup required. There are a small number of institutions (like Capital One) that do not support syncing on demand – in this case your bank will be listed but grayed out.
How to Use On Demand Syncing
To get started just tap the sync button at the top of the Transactions card in the dashboard.
You will then be presented with a list of your connected banks. Below the name of the institution you will see the last time it was synced. You can click in to see your sync history.
Then select the institutions you’d like to sync and press “Sync”. Once the sync finishes you’ll see the status of each institution sync and your transactions will appear just as they normally do.
If you’re having trouble connecting to your bank account, take a screenshot of the error message you’re getting and email that to [email protected].
Scheduling a transaction for a future week can be useful when you spend money today but want it reflected in the future. For example, if you purchase concert tickets but want to have the transaction recorded when you attend the concert.
To schedule a transaction in the future, simply create the transaction (tap the plus icon on the Dashboard page) then set the date to sometime after the current week. Weekly will prompt you to schedule the transaction.
You can see your scheduled transactions by tapping the calendar icon on the Dashboard page and then tapping “Scheduled transactions”. Weekly will automatically add these transactions when you start a new week that includes the transaction date.
Many budgeting apps automatically update your budget with new transactions from your bank. This can make it difficult to understand why your budget has changed and what new transactions came in since the last time you looked at your budget.
Weekly takes a different approach to support mindfulness and accuracy. Each time Weekly syncs new bank transactions you’ll receive a notification to review them. You’ll see a list of all the new transactions on the review page and be able to mark them as safe-to-spend, recurring, or ignore.
Safe-to-Spend
Transactions for day-to-day spending like groceries, gas, and entertainment should be marked as Safe-to-Spend. You may also have irregular income like birthday money from grandma that you’ll want to put here as well.
When you mark a transaction as Safe-to-Spend your Safe-to-Spend amount will be updated and you will see the transaction listed on the Dashboard under “transactions”.
Recurring
Transactions for your regular income or committed expenses should be marked as recurring. When a transaction is marked as recurring it does not update your Safe-to-Spend since it’s already been accounted for in your weekly Safe-to-Spend calculation.
If a recurring transaction matches the amount for an existing committed expense or regular income, you’ll see a suggestion button you can tap to quickly select that recurring item. If the transaction does not match the amount of your recurring item, simply select “Recurring” then tap on the recurring item the transaction is for. Weekly will give you the option to update your recurring item to keep your weekly Safe-to-Spend up to date.
Ignore
Transactions for credit card payments or internal account transfers don’t affect your spending and can safely be ignored. You may also want to ignore other transactions like one-off income that you simply want to save in your bank account.
Funds
You can think of a fund as a bucket of money that you save to and spend from. You can define how much money you want to add and how often. Weekly will convert this into a weekly amount and automatically add money into that fund each week. And when the time comes you can spend from that fund.
Here are the parts of the Fund creation process.
- Fund name: This is what you are saving for.
- Icon: Choose an icon for your fund and make it fun!
- Contribution: This is the amount you want to save during each interval.
- Savings Interval: This is how often you want to save your contribution.
- Starting Balance: What you have already saved. If you are just starting this amount would be blank. If you have already saved an amount, then add the amount you have saved.
The first step in setting up a fund is to just verbalize what you want to do. For example, “I want to add $500 to an Maui vacation fund every month and I haven’t saved anything yet.” So in the example of the Maui vacation fund, it would look like this:
- Fund name: Maui vacation
- Icon: Beach!
- Contribution: $500
- Savings Interval: Every month
- Starting Balance: $0 (Blank)
Note: If you had already saved say $300 for this vacation, you would add $300 here.
Weekly will automatically convert this contribution amount and interval into the equivalent weekly amount of $115.07. At the start of your week it will automatically take this out of your Safe-To-Spend and build up your fund!
To see your progress you can check your Funds overview screen.
Funds allow you to track money outside of your Safe-to-Spend. Think of funds as buckets you can save to and spend from.Funds are flexible and can be used for all sorts of things like tracking a savings goal or holiday budget, managing spending between partners, or even tracking your kid’s allowance.
Creating and contributing to funds
When you create a fund you can set a contribution amount (link to contribution amount FAQ) and starting balance. The contribution amount reduces your weekly Safe-to-Spend. Each week a new transaction will be added with your set contribution amount.
Read more about creating and contributing to funds.
Spending from funds
In addition to contributing to your funds you can also spend directly out of funds. When reviewing bank transactions simply select the “Funds” option and select the fund to spend from.
Read more about how to spend from funds.
Seeing all funds
You can keep up-to-date on all the funds in your account on the funds overview screen.
Read more about funds overview screen.
Locking and archiving
You can lock 
a fund when you want to keep it active but don’t want to see it in your funds list. This can be useful for seasonal funds like Christmas or birthdays. Locked funds still receive weekly contributions but are not available to select when reviewing bank transactions. Locked funds can be shown by tapping Filter & sort and selecting Show locked.You can archive 
a fund when you’re done with it. This will stop the weekly contributions and the fund will not be visible unless you select Show archived from the Filter & sort options.
Read more about about locking and archiving funds.
Caution 
Remember that Weekly uses averages (link to FAQ about averages) to compute what’s available to add to your Safe-to-Spend and your funds. Your fund balance is not directly tied to your checking or savings account. Make sure you’re setting aside money in your savings account when you contribute to funds.
When the time comes to use the money in a fund to purchase the thing you have been saving for, you can do so on the Transaction review screen. Instead of paying for the item out of your Safe-To-Spend, you choose the fund you want to spend out of. This reduces the amount in the fund and leaves your Safe-To-Spend undisturbed. Here’s how.
So, to take the money from a purchase from a fund instead of from your Safe-To-Spend there are two steps.
- Select “Fund” from Destination.
- Under “Select a fund.” chose the fund that the money should come from.
That’s it!
Also see:
Your funds overview screen is your control panel for all your funds. You can see all the funds you have set up, their current balances, contribution amounts and how much you have spent out of each of them. Below is a guide to how to reach your funds overview screen.
Note: You can reach the fund overview screen by swiping right on the main “Tracker” page and tapping “Funds”.
Let’s start by reviewing an individual fund.
Individual Fund
Here’s an entry for an individual fund with the definition for each of their parts.
In the example from the screen shot above, this is a fund that has been set up for a vacation. The user has saved a total of $2,695 in the fund over time, but has spent $130 of the fund giving the current balance of $2,565.26. In addition, every week the user is adding $75 additional dollars to the fund which will increase the current balance and the total saved.
- Fund Name – Vacation
- Current Balance – $2,565.26 – This is the total amount available to spent out of the fund.
- Saved – $2,695 – This is the total amount that has been saved in a fund before anything has been spent. So if nothing had been spent out of the fund, the Current Balance and Saved amounts would be equal. In this case though, $130 has been spent out of the fund already.
- Spent -$130 – This is how much money has been spent out of the fund.
- Contribution – $75 / week – This is how much money is being added to the fund each week.
Now let’s take a look at the Funds summary.
Funds summary
At the top of the screen you will see your funds summary. In the funds summary you can see the Total Balances and Weekly contributions for all of your funds in totality.
- Total balances: This is how much you have saved but have not yet spent in all your funds combined.
- Weekly contributions: How much you are contributing to your funds on a weekly basis.
Total Balance
So in the screenshot above, the total balance of $2,814 is sum of all the current balances in the funds. So currently in all the funds, they have an available balance (money that can be spent) of the following:
| +$228.63 | Birthday fund |
| +$273.01 | Car Maintenance fund |
| -$453.23 | Christmas fund |
| +$200.00 | Emergency fund |
| +$2,565.26 | Vacation fund |
| ——— | |
| $2,813.67 | Total, rounded to $2,814. |
$2814 is the total at the top of the screen. You may wonder why there is a negative balance in the Christmas Fund. That is because more things were bought with the Christmas fund than the fund had money for, resulting in a negative balance.
Weekly Contributions
When you set up your fund, you put in a contribution amount and an interval and Weekly converts this into its equivalent weekly amount. The sum of all the contributions from all the funds is what shows at the top of the screen.
| +$8.63 | Birthday fund |
| +$23.01 | Car Maintenance fund |
| +$47.95 | Christmas fund |
| +$100.00 | Emergency fund |
| +$75.00 | Vacation fund |
| ——— | |
| $254.59 | Total, rounded to $255 |
$255 is the total contribution amount that shows at the top of the screen.
Conclusion
The Funds overview screen is where you can see all the activity that is going on in your funds.
See also:
Locking and archiving
You can lock a fund when you want to keep it active but don’t want to see it in your funds list. This can be useful for seasonal funds like Christmas or birthdays. Locked funds still receive weekly contributions but are not available to select when reviewing bank transactions. Locked funds can be shown by tapping Filter & sort and selecting Show locked.
You can archive a fund when you’re done with it. This will stop the weekly contributions and the fund will not be visible unless you select Show archived from the Filter & sort options.
For more see the blog post “Lock and Archive Funds to Manage Their Availability“.
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