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Set up your household budget

Last updated on May 16, 2026

Set up your household budget

Categories, monthly goals, and household members. The pieces that turn Orange Way from a transaction list into a budget you can actually run.

The mental model

Orange Way thinks of your household budget in three nested pieces:

  1. Categories — the buckets your money lives in (Groceries, Rent, Kids, Bitcoin savings, Coffee, etc.). You pick them.
  2. Monthly goals — how much you want to spend or save in each category this month. Optional. If you don't set a goal, the category just tracks totals.
  3. Members — the humans + read-only third parties who can see and (optionally) edit. Always at least one: you.

A transaction belongs to a category. A category may belong to a goal. A goal lives in a month. Months roll over automatically.

Add categories

In Budget → Categories, click Add category. Pick:

  • Name — "Groceries", "Bitcoin DCA", whatever you say in real life.
  • Color — purely cosmetic, helps the chart.
  • Default goal (optional) — if you set this, every new month auto-creates a goal in this category with this amount.
  • Visibility — by default, household members all see this category. You can mark a category author-only (only the member who created it can see it) for things like personal one-off spending. We added this in the Phase 4.4 release; it's a per-category toggle.

Categories can nest (Groceries → Coffee, Groceries → Restaurants). Two levels deep, no more.

Set a monthly goal

In Budget → Month view, click any category and pick Set goal. Enter:

  • Amount — denominated in sats, BTC, USD, or your local currency. We convert at the day's median rate when needed.
  • Direction — "spend at most" (default for expenses) or "save at least" (for savings categories).

The dashboard shows you week-by-week progress against the goal, in plain "you have $230 left to spend on groceries this week" English. No financial jargon.

Invite a member

In Settings → Household, click Invite member. They get an email with a one-time link. When they click it:

  1. They sign up (or sign in if they already have an account).
  2. The app does a one-time household key exchange — they generate a key, you both confirm a six-digit code in person to make sure no one's in the middle, and the household master key gets wrapped for them.
  3. After that they see everything you see, including all past transactions.

Roles today:

  • Owner — full control, can invite/remove members, change household settings. Usually the first person to set up the household.
  • Member — read + write transactions, set goals, see everything except billing.
  • Read-only — see everything, change nothing. Default for kids under 18 and for auditors/accountants.

Roll over months

Every month rolls automatically on the 1st of the next month. Unfinished goals copy forward by default (you can disable per-category). Leftover budget from "spend at most" categories disappears (unless you flip the carry over toggle on the category). Unmet "save at least" goals show as red in the rolling summary.

You can also rename a month to mark it ("April 2026 — bought the truck") for searchability later.

Categorize transactions

When a sync brings in new transactions, Orange Way applies your category rules first (e.g. "anything from Whole Foods → Groceries"). Anything that doesn't match shows up in an Uncategorized bucket on the dashboard. You click each one, pick a category, and the next time a similar transaction comes in, Orange Way remembers.

Rules are local (per household). They never get shipped to Orange Way's servers in plaintext — same encryption-in-browser model as the rest of the app.

See also