Budget: Ready to plan

The Plan section, which includes Budget, is part of Porul Premium, with a 7-day free trial. See Pricing.

The problem

Many budgets ask you to divide your income into a dozen categories up front, then punish you when real life doesn’t match. You spend a month fixing the plan instead of using it.

Porul takes a simpler view. Some money is already spoken for (rent, EMIs, insurance). What is left is yours to steer, and the part that has no job yet is Ready to plan.

How Porul handles it

Ready to plan

Money for the month = this month's income + carry-over − this month's fixed bills
Ready to plan       = money for the month − Everyday Budget − loan prepayments − goal contributions

• Income is what you have logged as income this month.
• Fixed bills are the bills you set up in Fixed Expenses (see Daily Life Cost). Monthly bills always count. Quarterly and yearly bills count only in the month they fall due, never in past or future months. Bills that repeat every N days count once for each due date in the month, so a 28-day recharge counts twice in the months where it falls due twice. The Fixed Expenses footer shows the same total. They are taken off once: when you later mark a bill as paid, Ready to plan doesn’t drop again.
• Carry-over is an optional setting (Carry Forward Unused Budget in Settings). When it is on, last month’s income minus last month’s expenses is added.

The number at the top of the Budget tab is Ready to plan: what remains after everything you have planned and actually done this month. It shows 0 once every rupee has a job.

Three envelopes

Envelope	What it is for	It fills when you…
Everyday Budget	Everyday expenses	Log expenses that aren’t bills or loan payments
Loans	Planned prepayments on loans	Log a loan prepayment
Goals	Monthly contributions to your goals	Add money to a goal from the Budget page

The key idea is that plans are soft guides. Setting a plan never locks your money. Ready to plan goes down only when you actually pay, repay or save. For the Everyday Budget, Porul holds back whichever is larger: what you planned or what you have really used. Ready to plan never shows below 0. If your expenses and savings this month go past the money that came in, Porul shows the gap as Beyond Income rather than hiding it.

Loans and goals from the Budget

• Loans: the Loans card lists planned prepayments due this month. One tap logs them as paid, or use Log on a loan to pay a custom amount, capped at your Ready to plan amount. See Loans.
• Goals: the Goals card works the same way for your monthly contributions, also capped at your Ready to plan amount. See Goals.

Because goal contributions come only from the Budget page, Ready to plan stays the single source of truth for what is free to use.

Your savings

The Savings section shows money you have put towards goals, grouped by goal, plus Other Savings (piggy-bank money you logged on the Kakeibo screen). You can withdraw from any of them. The withdrawal is recorded and returns to your income.

Month-end leftover

At the start of a new month, Porul checks your Everyday Budget. If you planned 1,200 and used 1,100, the unused 100 is added to your income for the new month as Last Month Leftover.

Example

Your month starts like this:

Income	5,000
Fixed bills	1,800
Money for the month	3,200

You plan an Everyday Budget of 1,200. Nothing is used yet, so Porul holds back the planned 1,200 and Ready to plan is 2,000.

Over the month:

• You log 700 of everyday expenses: the plan (1,200) is still larger, so Ready to plan stays 2,000.
• You add 500 to a goal and pay 300 towards a loan: 2,000 − 500 − 300 = 1,200.
• Your everyday expenses reach 1,400, which is above the plan. Ready to plan now drops by the actual amount: 3,200 − 1,400 − 500 − 300 = 1,000.

At the end of the month nothing carries over from the Everyday Budget, because you used more than you planned. If you had used only 1,100, the 100 you didn’t use would come back as next month’s Last Month Leftover.