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Getting Started

Welcome to the official Keencents documentation and support guide. Here you'll learn everything you need to know about managing your money effectively with Keencents.

What is Keencents?​

Keencents is a modern zero-based envelope budgeting app that helps you take control of your finances. Our approach combines traditional envelope budgeting principles with modern technology to make budgeting simple and effective.

Introduction​

Keencents is a so called zero based envelope budgeting app.

With traditional envelope budgeting, you create actual enveleopes for each of your expense categories and put money into them. Just like with the traditional method, the digital version of it works the same way, where you can only put money into envelopes that you actually have in your bank accounts (and not some made-up projected income).

In zero-based budgeting, you should allocate all of your money. This gives all of your cash a specific purpose.

Adding your accounts​

For the app to know how much money you actually have, you need to add your accounts first with the correct current balances.

On Budget vs Off Budget accounts​

There are so called "On Budget" accounts, which are accounts that contribute to your budget and is money that you actually keep track of in your envelopes. These are typically accounts that you could spend from.

"Off Budget" accounts are accounts that are not included in your budget and are typically acounts that you cannot spend from, such as investments. They are still useful for example for tracking your net worth.

Examples:

  • On Budget: Cash, Checking, Savings, Credit Card
  • Off Budget: Asset (e.g. Stocks, Crypto), Liability (e.g. Mortgage)

Creating your envelopes (categories)​

When you first created a budget, the app automatically created a few default categories for you. On the "Budget" page, you can create new categories, edit existing ones and delete them. You can also create "category groups" which are just collections of categories.

You can make these envelopes / categories as detailed as you want. For example, you could have a category group called "Housing" and then create subgroups like "Rent", "Electricity", "Internet", "Property Tax", "Water", etc.

Other people prefer to keep it more simple and have a single "Housing" category with all of these subcategories combined. It's totally up to you. However, typically more detailed categories give you more control and help you to better understand your spending.

Adding transactions​

You should manually add every single transaction you make in real life. This is the only way for the app to know how much money you have left in each envelope.

Only add transactions that have happened after you created your budget and added your accounts. For example, if you added an account on October 1st and it had $1000 on that day, you should not add any transactions for that day or previous days, as the app has no way of knowing how much money you had in that account before you added it.

We'll go over how to add different types of transactions.

Income​

This is money you received as income (e.g. salary, gift, business income, etc.). Income should always be added to the "Available to Budget" envelope.

Expense​

This is money you spent. These should be added to the respective envelope / category. For example, if you bought groceries, you should add it to the "Groceries" envelope.

Refund​

This is money you received back (e.g. a refund from a purchase, a tax return, etc.). These should be added to the same category / envelope as the original transaction. For example, if you bought groceries for $100 and were refunded $20, you should add the $20 refund to the "Groceries" envelope.

Transfer​

This is money you moved from one account to another. This is simply done by choosing a "Payee" that has one of your accounts associated with it.

On budget vs off budget transfers​

If you transfer money between two on budget accounts, no money is actually leaving your budget, and therefore there is no need to assign this transfer to a category, because no money is actually being spent.

Similarly, if you transfer money between two off budget accounts, no money is entering or leaving your budget (as these accounts are not included in the budget at in the first place), and therefore there is no need to assign this transfer to a category either.

However, if you transfer money between an on budget and an off budget account, money is entering or leaving your budget, and therefore you should assign this transfer to the appropriate category. For example, if you transfer $100 from your checking account to your investment account, you should assign this transfer to the "Investments" envelope (or however you have categorized your investments).

Goals​

You can set goals for each envelope. This is useful for example to track how much you need to save up for a new TV or a vacation.

There are different types of goals:

  • Budget additionally: with this goal, your goal is to budget an additional amount of money for the envelope, regardless of how much money was left from the previous month(s). For example, if your goal is to budget an additional $50 for the "Dining Out" envelope, you would need to budget $50 more for the "Dining Out" envelope this month, even if you had $30 left from last month.
  • Budget up to: with this goal, your goal is to budget up to a certain amount of money for the envelope, taking into account how much money was left from the previous month(s). For example, if your goal is to budget up to $100 for the "Dining Out" envelope, and you had $20 left from last month, you would need to budget $80 this month for the "Dining Out" envelope. If you had a negative amount (e.g. -$20) from last month, you'd still need to budget $100 this month, and not $120, because our goal is to budget up to $100.
  • Save up: this goal is similar to the previous "Budget up to" goal, but the intent is different. This goal cannot be recurring, and you don't intend to spend from it along the way. It's more for "One-time" purchases that you want to save up for. For example, if you want to save up for a camera that costs $1000, you would create a goal of "Save up $1000 for Camera".

Each goal applies to a certain period of time. For example, if you create a goal to Budget up to $100 for the "Dining Out" envelope with a start date of October 1st, and a due date of October 31st, the goal is to budget up to $100 for the "Dining Out" envelope between these two dates. It will look at the previous time period (in this case, up until the end of September) to see how much money was left, and then budget the rest of the goal amount for the "Dining Out" envelope in October. The same holds true for any other variations of start and due dates.

Because this app is based on monthly budgets, the app will show you how much you should budget each month to reach your goal. So even if you specify a start / end date that is not at the start or the end of the month, or if you have a goal on a non-monthly basis, the app will still calculate the monthly budget based on the months of the start and due dates.

For example, if you create a goal to Budget up to $100 for the "Dining Out" envelope with a start date of October 15th, and a due date of December 10th, the app simply consider the start date to be October 1st and the due date to be December 31st, which means that there are 3 months to reach your goal. The app will then divide the goal amount by 3 to get the monthly goal amount.