And a way to reach a human for everything else.
Tally is a zero-based budget: every dollar of your planned income gets a job, and the figure at the top of the Budget screen should reach exactly $0.00. A new install arrives with a starter set of categories, all at zero — enter what you expect to be paid, then assign the rest.
Transactions are entered by hand. There is no bank connection, and that is deliberate: entering a purchase is the moment you notice it.
This is the part that surprises people. A category appears in a month because it was planned there, or because money moved through it there. Adding a category in September does not add it to August, and removing one from September leaves every other month exactly as it was.
When a month has no plan yet and the previous one does, the Budget screen offers to start from it — tap Copy. What you copy is the plan, not the spending, and editing the new month never reaches back into the old one.
They become uncategorized rather than disappearing, so your totals stay honest. The Budget screen tells you when a month has uncategorized transactions, and you can file them from the Activity screen.
Rent, paychecks and anything else on a schedule are offered, never written for you. When something is due you will see how many are waiting, and posting them is a tap — all at once, or one rule at a time from Settings → Recurring.
Dismissing the reminder on the Budget screen does not post anything. The items stay waiting under Settings.
Tally syncs through your own iCloud account. There is no Tally account and no server of ours in the middle — which is the point, and also why the things that go wrong are iCloud things rather than Tally things.
Changes usually appear on your other device within a few seconds. If something has not arrived, these are the four causes, in the order they actually happen:
The two devices are on different Apple Accounts. By far the most common. Check Settings → [your name] on iPhone, or System Settings → [your name] on Mac, and make sure the same account is signed in on both.
iCloud Drive is switched off for Tally. In Settings → [your name] → iCloud, make sure iCloud Drive is on and Tally is allowed to use it.
Low Power Mode, or a poor connection. Low Power Mode deliberately delays background syncing, sometimes for a long while. Opening Tally on both devices, with the screen on, is the fastest way to make it catch up.
It simply has not finished yet. A first sync after installing on a new device carries your whole history and can take a few minutes. Leave Tally open while it does.
Nothing is lost while you wait. A change you make offline is kept on that device and sent when it can be — you can keep entering transactions on a plane, and they will arrive later.
If a budget you share with someone else is the thing not updating, see Sharing a budget — that runs on the same mechanism, with one extra requirement: you both have to be signed in to iCloud.
Still stuck after all of that? Send an email and say which two devices, and roughly when you last saw them agree.
Settings → Your data exports the whole budget as a JSON file, or just the transactions as CSV. Keep a copy somewhere safe.
Replaces the budget you have rather than merging — merging two complete budgets would give you two of every category.
Adds those transactions to the budget you already have.
Settings → Start over clears the month you are on: its planned amounts and its category list. Transactions are kept — they simply stop being counted against a plan. It cannot be undone, so take a backup first.
Settings can put Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode in front of the budget. It locks when you leave the app, so the budget is not visible in the app switcher. The data underneath is protected by your device's own encryption, the same as every other app's.