Ready to Assign is the money sitting in your budgeted accounts that you haven't given a job to yet. It's the number at the top of the Budget screen, and it's the one number the whole method turns on.
The formula
Ready to Assign = your on-budget cash − everything already assigned to categories
Every dollar of on-budget cash is in exactly one of two places: inside a category's Available, or unassigned in Ready to Assign. Nowhere else. That's the whole idea, and it's why the number is checkable.
What counts as "on-budget cash"
The sum of every transaction in your checking, savings, and cash accounts that are marked on-budget. Not credit cards, not loans, not tracking accounts.
This is a real balance, not an estimate — it already includes your opening balances, your paychecks, your spending, and your card payments. Income isn't added separately on top, because it's already in the balance. Adding it again would double-count it.
Money that lands on a credit card or a loan account is not budgetable cash, so an inflow there never raises Ready to Assign.
A worked example
Say you have two on-budget accounts:
| Account | Balance |
|---|---|
| Checking | $3,200.00 |
| Savings | $1,500.00 |
| On-budget cash | $4,700.00 |
And four categories with money in them:
| Category | Available |
|---|---|
| Rent | $1,800.00 |
| Groceries | $400.00 |
| Emergency Fund | $1,500.00 |
| Visa Payment | $250.00 |
| Total assigned | $3,950.00 |
$4,700.00 − $3,950.00 = $750.00 Ready to Assign
That $750.00 is real money in your checking account with no job. Assign it and Ready to Assign drops by exactly that amount — the cash didn't move, it just got a name.
Where a category's Available comes from
Each category's Available is built the same way every month:
Available = carried in + assigned + activity + card reserve
- Carried in — what was left in the category at the end of last month.
- Assigned — what you gave it this month.
- Activity — what you spent from it this month (a negative number).
- Card reserve — only for credit-card payment categories. See how credit cards work.
Click any number on the Budget screen to see this breakdown for that category and month.
Why your Ready to Assign changed
The number only moves for a handful of reasons. If it changed and you don't know why:
| What happened | Effect on Ready to Assign |
|---|---|
| Income landed in an on-budget cash account | Goes up |
| You assigned money to a category | Goes down |
| You moved money between two categories | No change — cash didn't enter or leave |
| You spent from a funded category | No change — the cash left, but so did the Available |
| You overspent with cash | Goes down — see overspending |
| You overspent on a credit card | No change — that's debt, not a cash shortfall |
| You paid a credit card | No change — cash left checking, the reserve went with it |
| A transfer between two on-budget accounts | No change |
| You imported or connected an account with a balance | Goes up by the opening balance |
If Ready to Assign is negative
You've assigned more than you have. This is normal and fixable — it usually means you budgeted optimistically, or a cash overspend last month charged itself forward.
Fix it by taking money back out of a category: click the category's Available, choose Move money, and move it to Ready to Assign. Keep going until the number reaches $0.00.
Leaving it negative doesn't break anything, but every category number below it is now promising money you don't have.
If the number looks wrong
The arithmetic is always the two sums above, so a surprising result means one of the inputs is surprising. In order of likelihood:
- An account is on-budget when it shouldn't be (or the reverse). A tracking account you don't budget from — an investment account, say — should be off-budget. Check on the account's detail page.
- An account type is wrong. A credit card classified as checking would wrongly add its balance to your cash. Fix the type on the account's detail page.
- A hidden category still holds money. Hidden categories are archived, not deleted — their Available still counts. Unhide it to see the balance.
- An opening balance is wrong. Every account's balance derives entirely from its transactions, including the "Starting Balance" one. Edit it from the account detail page.
If it still doesn't reconcile, contact support with the two totals you're seeing — the on-budget cash sum and the assigned sum — and we'll trace it with you.