How to budget with Mintro.
Every budgeting app ever made has the same dirty secret: the app was never the hard part. The hard part was the Sunday hour of dragging transactions into categories — and that job just stopped being yours. Mintro is a budget, kept by a clerk, and the clerk is your agent. The method underneath is zero-based envelope budgeting — every dollar gets a job before you spend it — and this page explains it, then shows you six ways people run it. Pick one, tell your agent, change your mind next month: the method is the frame, and what you do inside it is yours.
The model: five ideas
Envelopes. Named buckets you define. Groceries. Rent. The patio fund your spouse is skeptical about. An envelope's total is the sum of everything filed into it — cached, always current, never a spinner.
Filing. Transactions arrive from your bank into an inbox. Your agent files each one into an envelope — or splits it across several. Unfiled transactions expire in 45 days; filed ones live with your budget forever.
Targets. A planned amount on an envelope, sitting beside the actual. Here is the unusual part: Mintro never resets a target, never rolls one over, never sends you a shame notification at 11pm. Your agent does those things — or doesn't — exactly the way you told it to. That inertness is what makes every method below possible.
Cashflow. Thirty days behind you, thirty ahead. Last month is what posted. Projected is upcoming bills and income. If a bill takes remaining below warn, the line says so while you can still move money.
Papers. Written documents on your budget: your method, your rules, your plans. Your agent reads them at the start of a session and follows them. Change the paper, change the behavior. A rule is prose here, not code.
> what's cashflow looking like
> set up envelopes for my life. Ask me questions first.
> write our method down as a paper, so you remember it next time
Six ways to run your budget
Each method is an envelope layout plus a paper your agent follows. Nothing below is built into Mintro — that is the point. Switching methods is rewriting a paper, not migrating an app.
Classic envelopes (the YNAB-style discipline)
Zero-based: every dollar that arrives gets a job. Income lands, the agent allocates 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 lands, 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 the bill lands on a full envelope instead of a bad 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 paper rule 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 double-counting a credit card, and knowing what money is already spoken for before the month starts. Both are rules, not features. Your agent follows them from a paper; Mintro just keeps the numbers honest.
Credit cards, counted once
A card purchase is spending the moment it happens — it goes to Groceries, not to some card bucket, so the envelope is right before you have paid a cent. Paying the card is not spending: both legs (chequing out, card in) land in a Transfers envelope and net to zero. Refunds go back to the envelope they came from; interest and fees are their own line; rewards are income. Follow those four rules and the card can never count twice. Want to know what you owe? Your agent sums the card's transactions since the last payment — history is one call.
> 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 spoken for
Mortgage, car, insurance, subscriptions: the money is gone before the month starts, so the budget should say so. The recurrence lives in a paper the agent keeps; the amount lives in each envelope's target; the agent enters the bills on schedule and reconciles them when the real transactions post. You open the budget and the mortgage is already accounted for — which is the whole point of YNAB's scheduled transactions, without a scheduler you have to fight.
> set up my recurring bills: mortgage $1,842 on the 1st, car $412 on the 15th, insurance $180 on the 3rd. Write them as a paper, set the targets, and every month enter them and reconcile against the real transactions when they arrive.
> what is already spoken for this month, and what is actually free?
Interfaces your agent can build you
Mintro ships a screen, and the API behind it is open — so the one your agent builds is exactly the one you wanted. These are real asks — each is one prompt and an evening at most. Your key stays on your machine, never in shipped browser code.
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: write a month-XX paper with the numbers and one honest paragraph, and render it 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 pattern behind all four: the budget is the source of truth, the paper is the method, and the interface is disposable. Ask for a different one tomorrow.