Your family's money app, live at https://sagebugdet.web.app
Open the link above on your phone. For an app-like experience, tap the share/menu button in your browser and choose Add to Home Screen — SageBudget gets its own icon and opens full-screen.
Sign in one of three ways: Continue with Google (easiest — one tap with your Gmail), email + password (tap Create account the first time; there's a Forgot password link if you need it), or Use locally on this device (no account; data stays in that browser only — fine for trying things out, but no syncing).
When a family member signs in with an email that's been added under Settings → Family, the app automatically drops them into their own view.
Amed (Admin) sees everything: all money, all bills, all projects, family management, payday splitting, net worth.
Maria (Adult + Business) sees her own budget, her transactions, her projects, plus a Business tab for the makeup channel — YouTube/Facebook/TikTok income, business expenses, and vendor products.
Kids get a simple page: their money total, big "I got money" / "I spent money" buttons, savings goals with progress bars, and a daily money tip. No clutter, no grown-up numbers.
On a shared device, tap your avatar (top right) → Switch profile. Give each person a PIN in Settings → Family if you want profiles locked.
The ring shows how much of this month's income you've spent — green, then amber at 80%, red if over. The big number is Safe to spend: income minus what you've spent minus bills that haven't hit yet. That's the honest number, not the optimistic one.
Below it, the icon grid is your shortcut row: Add a transaction, log a Payday, Scan a bill, Import a CSV, and jump to Bills, Projects, Reports, or Docs.
At the start of each month a recap card appears showing last month's net result, your biggest spending category, and which budgets held. Dismiss it when you've read it.
Tap 💵 Payday on Home, enter your paycheck amount, and the app: logs the income, automatically transfers Maria's biweekly amount to her profile (set the amount in Settings → Family → her profile → "Deposit per payday"), then opens "Give every dollar a job" — assign what's left across your categories until the counter hits $0. Whatever you assign becomes this month's budget caps. This envelope habit is the single most effective thing in the app — families who assign every dollar stick to budgets 20-30% better.
Three ways, use whichever fits:
Import CSV (most reliable): log into LGE or USAA online banking, download transactions as CSV, then Activity → Import CSV. The app auto-detects the columns, auto-categorizes (Kroger → Groceries, Greystone → Power, AT&T → Phone…), skips duplicates, and remembers each bank's format for next time.
Scan PDF: got an e-bill or PDF statement? Activity → Scan PDF (or Bills → "Scan a bill PDF"). The file is read in your browser and thrown away — only the numbers stay. Bills auto-fill amount and due date; statements offer a transaction import preview. Works on downloaded e-bills, not photos of paper bills.
Type it in: the + button anywhere. Start typing "Kroger" and the category picks itself.
Add each recurring bill once (name, typical amount, due day, whose bill it is). The Bills tab then tracks due dates: 📅 upcoming, ⏰ due soon, ⚠️ overdue, ✅ paid. Tap Mark paid and it logs the payment as a transaction automatically.
The 🔁 Detected subscriptions card is worth checking monthly — it finds recurring charges in your imported transactions (streaming, gym, apps) that you're not tracking yet, with the monthly total they're quietly costing you. One tap converts any of them to a tracked bill.
Set monthly caps per category in Settings → Category budgets (tap a category name to rename it, change its emoji, or add new ones). Home shows progress bars that turn red when a category blows past its cap. Two power options: envelopes (from the Payday flow or Settings) override the default caps for a specific month, and rollover (checkbox in Settings) carries unspent budget into next month — under-spend groceries by $50 and next month's cap is $50 bigger.
💰 Savings goals are for money targets: emergency fund, vacation, Christmas. Set a target and optional date, and the app shows the monthly pace needed ("≈$180/mo to hit Dec 31"). Add money whenever you put some aside.
🔨 House projects are for real work: paint the living room, build the deck. Each has a savings target, a shopping list (add Home Depot items with prices and links — the list totals itself), and a place for contractor quotes and photos. Kids' goals work the same way but simpler — help them set one up and let them watch the bar fill.
Log each platform payout with + Income (YouTube/Facebook/TikTok/Other), business purchases with + Expense, and free products from brands with + Product (mark them "posted" once the video is up). The tab shows profit for the month, income by platform, all-time totals, and the pending-products count — everything needed come tax time.
Pick any month at the top. You get: where the money went (donut chart by category), in vs. out for 6 months, a projection of the next 3 months based on your averages, top merchants, a 12-month spending trend, and Net worth — add your account balances (LGE, USAA, retirement, and debts) and update them monthly; the chart shows whether the family's total is climbing.
Activity → Docs stores files you want to keep — pay stubs, statements, receipts (up to 700 KB each on the current plan). Remember: for bills you don't need to store anything — Scan extracts the data and discards the file.
Backups: Settings → Export backup downloads everything as one file; Restore brings it back. Do this monthly even though data syncs to Firebase. Wrong category on a transaction? Tap it, change it, save — the app learns nothing automatically from this yet, so repeat offenders are worth a custom category. Something looks stale? Pull down to refresh, or sign out and back in.
Two features wait for the Firebase Blaze upgrade (still ~$0/month at family scale, just needs a card on file): live bank sync via Plaid — balances and transactions pull automatically from LGE and USAA, no more CSVs (setup guide: SETUP-PLAID.md), and full-size document uploads past 700 KB. Everything else in this guide works today, free.
Questions, bugs, or feature ideas? Tell Claude — the whole platform is one file that's quick to change.