Beyond Payday never asks for your bank username or password — that's not a limitation, it's the whole design. You type your numbers in yourself, once, and update them when they change. There are no bank credentials to share or bank connections to maintain. You decide what to track and keep the plan current by updating your amounts and balances.
How it works
- No bank credentials are ever requested. Beyond Payday doesn't connect to services like Plaid that link budgeting apps to your bank account. There's no login screen asking for your bank username and password, because there's nothing on the other end waiting to receive it.
- Your numbers, your precision. You decide what counts as "checking," what a bill's real monthly amount is, and how to log something unusual — a bank feed doesn't always get that right, and you'd have to go fix it anyway.
- A monthly check-in keeps your plan current. Refresh balances, adjust changed income and bills, and review your dashboard and projections. About 15 minutes is an estimate, not a measured average; your household may need more or less time.
- You can start from a spreadsheet. If your bills, assets, or debts are already in a CSV or Excel file, you can import them once instead of typing each one. See Import your data.
- You can track things a bank feed can't see. Cash, a shared expense with a roommate, a side-gig payment — anything you know about but no bank would report.
An example with real numbers
Imagine your checking account holds $3,240 today. In Beyond Payday, you open Assets (opens in a new tab), edit the balance, and type $3,240 — that's it, the number is exactly right, right now. There's no waiting on an overnight sync, no stale balance from yesterday, and no outage on a bank's end that leaves the app showing last week's number. Updating it again next month takes the same few seconds.
Assumptions and limits
- This is a deliberate trade-off, not a missing feature. Beyond Payday is planned and built around manual entry — it isn't a bank-sync product that happens to lack the integration.
- Your numbers are only as current as your last update. If you forget to update a balance, Beyond Payday doesn't know it changed. There's no background sync catching up for you.
- No automatic transaction import. Beyond Payday tracks totals, like "Rent: $1,800/month," not a line-by-line list of every purchase — so there's nothing to categorize, but also no receipt-level detail.
FAQ
Does Beyond Payday offer bank syncing?
No. Manual entry is a deliberate design choice Beyond Payday is built around, not a missing feature.
Isn't typing in my numbers more work than syncing my bank?
It takes a few minutes whenever a balance changes, and in exchange you never deal with a broken sync or a bank re-authentication prompt.
What is a bank-linking service like Plaid?
It's a third-party company some budgeting apps use to connect to your bank account — you'd give it your bank login, and it hands your transaction data to the app. Beyond Payday doesn't use one.
Is manual entry less accurate than a bank sync?
It reflects exactly what you type, with nothing auto-categorized incorrectly — the trade-off is that it only updates when you update it.