Learning centre · methods
Six ways to run your budget.
Every budgeting app has the same catch: you still spend part of every week putting purchases into envelopes. With Mintro, that job doesn’t have to be yours. Mintro is envelope budgeting: you decide where your money goes, and ChatGPT, Claude, or Kimi sorts the transactions into envelopes for you. This page explains the method, then six ways people run it. Pick one, tell your chat which one you want, and change your mind next month if it doesn’t suit you. Step-by-step guides with screenshots live in the Learning centre.
The model: five ideas
Envelopes. An envelope is a named pot of money that you create, like Groceries, Rent, or the patio fund your spouse is skeptical about. Its total is the sum of everything put into it, and it is always up to date the moment you look.
Filing. Transactions arrive from your bank into an inbox. Filing a transaction means putting it in an envelope, and your agent files each one, or splits it across several envelopes. A transaction that is never filed is removed after 45 days; filed ones stay with your budget for good.
Targets. A target is the amount you plan to put in an envelope, shown beside what is actually there. Here is the unusual part: Mintro never resets a target, never rolls one over, and never sends you a guilt-trip notification at 11pm. Your agent does those things, or doesn’t, exactly the way you told it to. Because Mintro itself stays out of the way, every method below is possible.
Cashflow. A chart of your balance, from the recent past into the months ahead. The past is what actually happened at the bank. The future is projected from your scheduled bills and income, plus the everyday spending you choose to count. If a bill is going to take an account below its Alarm amount, the chart shows it, and an alert can tell you while you still have time to move money.
Months. Money left in an envelope carries into the next month. Ready to assign, the number at the top of the budget, is money that hasn’t been given a job yet, and it waits there until you give it one.
what's cashflow looking like
set up envelopes for my life. Ask me questions first.
file this week's inbox
Six ways to run your budget
Each method is a set of envelopes plus an instruction you give your agent. None of them is built into Mintro, and that is deliberate: switching methods means giving ChatGPT a different instruction, not moving to a different app.
Classic envelopes (the YNAB-style discipline)
Zero-based: every dollar that arrives gets a job. Income arrives, the agent assigns it across envelopes until nothing is unassigned, and spending draws each envelope down. Overspend an envelope and the money has to come from another one. That trade-off is the method.
run zero-based envelopes. When income arrives, propose an allocation and wait for my ok.
50/30/20
Three envelopes (needs, wants, savings) targeted at 50%, 30%, and 20% of monthly income. Coarse on purpose: ten seconds of attention a week, one honest picture of where the month went.
run 50/30/20 on my take-home pay. File everything into needs, wants, or savings, and tell me the percentages each Sunday.
Pay yourself first
Savings is not what is left over. It is the first filing. The agent watches for income, confirms the transfer to savings happened (or nags you), and only then does the rest of the month get to exist.
15% of every paycheque goes to Savings before anything else. If the transfer hasn't happened within two days of payday, tell me.
Sinking funds
Big irregular expenses (insurance, car repairs, December) become envelopes that fill a little every month, so when the bill arrives the envelope is already full, instead of the bill ruining a week. Targets carry the monthly fill amount; the note carries the deadline.
create sinking funds for car insurance ($1,440 due in March) and holidays ($1,800 due in December). Work out the monthly fill and track it.
The anti-budget
One rule: cap the categories that actually leak (eating out, impulse, subscriptions) and ignore everything else. Three envelopes with targets, one catch-all without. Minimum ceremony, most of the benefit.
I only want to watch Eating out, Shopping, and Subscriptions. Cap them, file the rest into Everything else, and only ever talk to me about the three.
The small-business budget (cash basis)
Mintro records what happened at the bank: money in, money out, filed into envelopes like Payroll, Software, and Taxes. That is cash-basis bookkeeping: real for cash flow, and what most small operations run on day to day. Accrual accounting (recognizing revenue when earned and expenses when incurred, invoices, depreciation) is your accountant's ledger, not this budget. The clean division: Mintro tells you where the cash went and holds your set-asides; your accountant does the accrual statements at year end. A Taxes envelope filled by a prompt is the bridge.
file business transactions by envelope, and move 25% of every customer deposit's amount into the Taxes set-aside target. Flag anything over $1,000.
Two things YNAB got right, and how they work here
YNAB earned its reputation on two habits: never counting credit card spending twice, and knowing which money is already committed to bills before the month starts. Mintro handles both the same way YNAB does, and your agent does the routine work for you.
Credit cards, without counting spending twice
A card purchase is spending the moment it happens. It is filed to Groceries, not to the card, so the envelope is right before you have paid a cent, and the same amount moves from Groceries into the card's payment envelope, which Mintro creates when you add the card. Paying the card is not new spending: it is a transfer from chequing to the card, paid from money the payment envelope already holds. Refunds go back to the envelope they came from, and interest and fees get an envelope of their own. Follow those rules and the card can never be counted twice. Want to know what you owe? The card's balance is on Accounts, and the payment envelope shows how much of it is already set aside.
file my Visa like YNAB would: purchases to their envelopes, payments as transfers, refunds back where they came from. Then tell me what I owe on the card right now.
Recurring bills: money that is already committed
Mortgage, car, insurance, subscriptions: that money is committed before the month starts, so the budget should say so. Each one is set up once on the budget as a bill, and the amount goes in its envelope's target. Upcoming shows what is due, ChatGPT enters each bill when it is paid, and a matching transaction from the bank is recorded as that bill. Nothing is entered automatically unless you turn that on for a bill. You open the budget and the mortgage is already accounted for, which is the whole point of YNAB's scheduled transactions.
set up my recurring bills: mortgage $1,842 on the 1st, car $412 on the 15th, insurance $180 on the 3rd. Set the targets, and every month enter them and reconcile against the real transactions when they arrive.
which money is already committed to bills this month, and how much is actually free?
Interfaces your agent can build you
Mintro comes with its own app, and ChatGPT can build you another screen as well. These are real requests, and each one takes one instruction and an evening. Your key stays on your computer.
The morning brief
A message, not an app. Arrives with coffee.
every morning at 7, message me my budget in five lines or less
The wall display
An old tablet, a full-screen page, the whole household's state at a glance.
build a full-screen status page for the kitchen tablet. Paper background, big type, refresh every 10 minutes.
The month-end close, printed
A receipt for the month. Some people tape them to the fridge.
close each month: the numbers and one honest paragraph, printable
The company cockpit
Burn, runway, set-asides, read straight off the budget by a scoped, read-only key.
build the company a cash view: burn, biggest movers, and the tax set-aside vs target. Read-only key.
The idea behind all four is the same: the budget in Mintro is the one true record, the method lives in your instructions to the chat, and any screen built on top can be thrown away. You can ask for a different one tomorrow.