How Arca works, screen by screen — plus common questions and what's coming next.
Arca is a budgeting app built on the envelope method: you take the money that is actually in your accounts right now and divide it among categories — your “envelopes” — then spend from those envelopes. You never budget money you don't have yet.
Four tabs cover everything:
Arca does not connect to your bank. You enter balances and transactions yourself. That keeps your banking credentials out of it entirely, and most people find that recording spending as it happens makes them far more aware of where the money goes. Automatic import is on the roadmap.
The first pass takes about twenty minutes.
That loop — assign, spend, adjust — is the whole method.
The left sidebar lists your accounts grouped into Budget, Debt, Assets and Closed, each with a running total. Click an account to open its register. “All Accounts” shows net worth and recent activity across everything.
Transactions are grouped by day, newest first, with a running Balance column that reads correctly top to bottom — the oldest row shows just its own amount and each row above adds the next. The top row is your current working balance.
Use Add transaction on an account, or click any row to edit it in place. A transaction has a date, payee, category, memo, and an amount entered as either an Outflow or an Inflow. The category picker groups every category under its group heading. Amount fields accept shortcuts — see Entering amounts.
The C dot on each row marks whether the transaction has posted at your bank yet. Click it to toggle. Cleared status is a reconciliation aid only — it never changes the budget math. The account summary shows Cleared, Uncleared and Working balances so you can tick items off against your statement.
To move money between two of your accounts, add a transaction and choose the “Transfer: To/From <account>” payee. Arca creates both sides and keeps them linked — edit or delete one and the other follows. Transfers between two on‑budget accounts take no category and don't touch your plan.
Select several rows with the checkboxes to set a category or delete them in one go. Right‑click (or long‑press) a single row for quick actions: mark cleared, categorise, move to another account, duplicate, turn it into a recurring schedule, or delete.
Each account has a collapsible Planned Transactions drawer listing upcoming occurrences of your recurring schedules for the next month, with a running balance and an Enter now button to post one early. See Recurring transactions.
Below the drawer, a collapsible Balance forecast chart projects the account's balance forward — 1, 3, 6 or 12 months — by stepping through your future‑dated transactions and recurring occurrences. It marks the low point and flags the date the balance would drop below $0.
Give a debt account an APR and a minimum / fixed payment and Arca shows a payoff projection: months to zero, payoff date, total interest, and a balance‑decline chart. If the payment is smaller than the monthly interest it says so.
Ready to Assign is the cash sitting in your on‑budget accounts that you haven't assigned to any category yet. Each month the job is to get it to zero — every dollar has a job. The banner turns green at exactly $0, red if you've assigned more than you have.
Categories live inside groups. Turn on Edit layout to add, rename, delete, and drag‑and‑drop groups and categories anywhere you like; turn it off to lock the layout so it can't change by accident. Groups collapse individually.
Click a category's Assigned cell and type an amount. It's a
smart field: 3799 becomes 37.99, 100+50
evaluates to 150.00, and a leading − subtracts from
what's there — so −50 on a category pulls $50 back out and
returns it to Ready to Assign. Full details in
Entering amounts.
The colour of a category's Available amount tells you where it stands:
Click the chip to open a small menu that moves money in or out.
An overspent category shows a red row with an inset bar. Click its Available chip and pick Cover from… — Ready to Assign or another category with a positive balance — and Arca moves exactly the shortfall. Under‑funded categories offer a one‑click Auto‑assign of what they still need.
When a category has a planned (recurring) transaction coming up that its balance won't cover, the Available chip goes amber. If that shortfall would hit within a few days, the whole row turns orange and names the transaction and date. You choose the lead time in Plan settings → “Warn about upcoming overspending” (default 5 days).
A target tells Arca how much a category needs so it can tell you what to assign. Open a category and choose a kind:
“Refill this category to $X every week, two weeks, month or year.” Arca shows the per‑month equivalent as Needed this month.
“Have $X saved by a date.” Arca divides what's still needed by the number of months left and re‑paces every month: assign less than suggested and next month's figure rises to keep you on track; assign more and it falls. In the due month it asks for the whole remaining amount.
The row shows target met once you're at or above the amount for the month; the details pane shows a progress bar and an Assign to meet your target button.
Click a category name to select it. The right side of the Plan tab switches from the month summary to a details pane for that category: the Available breakdown (left over from last month, assigned, activity), any upcoming planned transactions, and the Target section with progress and quick‑assign.
Save $6,000.00 by 03/01 · $525/mo, 8 months left
A pill bar above the categories filters the list to Overspent, Underfunded, Overfunded or Has money, each with a live count. Empty groups collapse away. Your choice is remembered.
A category's Available balance carries from one month into the next. A positive balance stays put — Arca never sweeps it back to Ready to Assign. A negative (overspent) cash balance rolls forward as a negative, so you see the hole until you fill it.
From an account, add a recurring transaction: an amount, a payee (or a transfer), a category, a frequency (weekly through yearly, or Custom… for any interval such as “every 3 weeks” or “every 10 days”), an anchor date, and an optional end date. Arca stores no future rows — it projects the occurrences on the fly.
Four views share a date‑range picker (default: the last six months).
The Goals tab is a placeholder for a future release. You can create goal entries today, but they aren't yet wired into the budgeting math. Savings goals that tie into your categories are on the roadmap; for now, use a save‑by‑a‑date target on a category.
A plan is one household budget — its own accounts, categories and balances. Everyone invited to a plan sees the same thing, and one subscription covers the whole household. You can run more than one plan (say, a household budget and a side business) and switch between them from the account menu in the top‑right.
The in‑app screen to invite members is on the roadmap. Until it ships, email support@arcabudget.com to have someone added to your plan.
Every dollar field in Arca works the same way, keypad‑style:
3799 → 37.99.100+50 → 150.00, (2+3)*10 → 50.00.+100 adds, −30 subtracts, *2, /4.
Arca shows dates as mm/dd/yyyy and treats “today” using
your device's time zone, so a transaction added late at
night lands on the right calendar day for you.
Sign in with the email and password you signed up with. Change your password or display name under Account settings.
The balance column accumulates oldest‑to‑newest. The opening‑balance row should show its own amount; if a day looks off, check that transaction dates are correct.
Not yet — it's manual by design. Automatic import is on the roadmap.
Not yet. CSV import is planned, and automatic bank sync after that.
Yes — a plan belongs to a household and one subscription covers everyone in it. The in‑app invite screen is on the roadmap; email support to add a member for now.
Arca works in any mobile browser today; a dedicated iOS app is planned.
Give the category a yearly spending target or a save‑by‑a‑date target set to the due date.
For a save‑by‑a‑date target, Arca re‑divides what's still needed by the months remaining, so the figure moves as you get ahead or fall behind.
Traffic is encrypted with HTTPS, data is encrypted at rest, and everything runs on AWS.
What we're building and what's planned. No dates are promised — priorities move with feedback.
Questions, bugs, feature requests — email support@arcabudget.com. Early feedback shapes what we build next.