Comprehensive Getting Started Guide

Understanding the Envelope Budget Method

Kualia is fundamentally build on the "envelope" budgeting method. Traditionally, envelope budgeting meant literally putting cash into envelopes labeled for specific purposes—like groceries, rent, or entertainment. Once an envelope was empty, you couldn’t spend any more in that category until you refilled it.

This method is all about being intentional with your money and staying within your limits.

Kualia takes this concept and digitizes it, making your envelopes virtual, so they are easy to track across cashless and cash purchases. At the start of each month, you'll take cash currently available in your accounts (linked through Plaid and manual) and assign it to your categories (think of these like your envelopes).

Throughout the month, just like the Envelope budgeting method you'll spend money pulling from the virtual funding to these categories to pay for expenses!

The In-App Tutorial Flow

Whenever you get started with Kualia, you'll be taken through our tutorial flow detailing the various components of Kualia and how they work together to provide an intuitive envelope budgeting experience. This article is intended to serve as a reference or refresher beyond the in-app tutorial flow!

Budget Creation & Personalization

If you scroll through your budget on the Budget page, you'll see a list of categories that were added to your account out of the box based on your preferences during account creation. These will be some basic budgeting items like phone, water, groceries, and things like that. You'll want to go through these categories and customize them for you… changing the targets, titles, emojis, and so on!

You don't have to do this all at once… start with the basics and go from there. We like to recommend asking yourself "what are my bills… what are my needs…what are my savings goals… and what are my wants" to help guide how you customize your categories.

Adding Accounts

You'll need to add an account to Kualia to start putting into your envelopes (categories) to be spent from. This can be either a linked account (through our integration with Plaid) or a manual account. Either one works, and it depends on your preferences. To add an account, head to the Accounts page and simply select the "add account" button. From here you'll have the option to select a linked or unlinked account.

Your accounts will be directly tied to how you assign your budget in the next step… Remember the envelope methodology, budgeting for the future, using dollars available today!

Category Assignment

Once you've personalized your categories, and added an account you'll need to finally "stuff the envelope" with cash! This is the fun part, assigning the money from your accounts into the categories you'll spend from. As an example, each month you'll want to assign dollars you have into the Groceries category so that when you spend against that category, you can "pull money out of the envelope" as the month goes on.

Keep in mind that this is intended to make sure you hold yourself accountable for any spending in a category, by virtually simulating the stuffing of cash into an envelope, and pulling cash out when a purchase is made.

To assign money to a category, you can accomplish this in two main ways… individually to a single category, or to multiple using the Quick Assign feature. We'll discuss how both of those processes look:

Assigning Budget to Individual Categories

To assign some of your available budget to an individual category, you can do so by simply navigating to the Budget page and clicking on one of your categories. You'll be able to assign a custom amount, or quick assign in full to hit your target for that month.

This is the same as opening a single envelope and putting cash into it, from which you'll spend

Quick Assigning to Multiple Categories

To assign some of your available budget to an multiple categories, you can do so by simply clicking the Quick Assign button located on the Activity page. This will open a screen where you'll be able to quick assign to all of your categories at once. This will assign budget to your categories in full, in the order they are listed. The goal here is to fund the highest priority categories first… your bills and needs will need accounted for before your wants are after all!

You'll be able to review the outcome of quick assign before saving and funding categories. If you do not have enough cash available to fully fund your month, assigning budget on an individual basis will likely be the better approach.

Kualia's Funding Statuses

When reviewing your budget from the Budget page you'll get a view of all your categories in one place. Each category will have their own Status depending on how your spending and funding has gone for that category so far in the month. The statuses a category may have are:

Underfunded Categories

Pretend every month you set aside $350 for groceries… using our methodology you’ll need to “assign” (or add money to the envelope) so that you can pull money from it throughout the month and spend against the category! If a category has not been funded, it will show up with a grey progress bar.

Overspent Categories

Now, imagine you assign $350 to the envelope, but at the end of the month you end up spending $50 more than you budgeted for. To pay for that $50 extra you left yourself an IOU in the envelope. Categories that are overspent will show up as “overspent” with a red progress bar until you assign more money (think of this like paying back the IOU you left yourself in the envelope).

On Target Categories

Lastly, if you added $350 to the groceries envelope and you’ve only pulled $200 from it, that category will be considered “on target” meaning you’ve still got funds available in the envelope to pull from! On target categories will show up with a green progress bar.

Transaction Reflection

Envelope budgeting with Kualia, just like envelope budgeting with real envelopes and cash is a daily activity… which is why we've made Transaction Reflection intuitive and fun. Anytime a manual or linked transaction is added to Kualia, you'll need to assign a category that transaction pulls budgeting from. As an example, if I have $400 in my groceries budget go to the store spending $250 on groceries, that transaction can come in automatically for me to reflect. I'll need to mark the category for that transaction as groceries pulling cash out of my envelope and leaving me with $150 left to spend on groceries for the month.

Manually added transactions do not have to be reflected as a category is required on transaction creation