The anchor — what is really in the account

Anchor the forecast to a real account balance and compare later readings with what the plan predicted.

To project your balance, Ebbe needs one real starting point. It can calculate what comes in and goes out, but it cannot know what the account holds today. You provide that fixed point as a balance reading.

Taking a reading

Settings → Balances → New balance reading. Two fields: a date, and what the account actually holds.

The date means the balance at the start of that day — payments due that day still lie ahead. So if you read your balance in the morning of the 1st, before the rent leaves, enter the 1st.

A reading is identified by its date, not by an id. Enter a second reading for a day you have already recorded and it replaces the first; two balances for one day cannot both be true.

Negative is fine. An overdrawn account is a fact, and Ebbe would rather hold it than round it up.

What the plan predicted

Beside every reading except the first, Ebbe shows what the projection had said that day would hold, and the difference between the two.

That number is stored at the moment you take the reading, and never recalculated. If you add a forgotten item later, the earlier prediction stays as it was. This keeps the comparison between the original plan and the real balance meaningful.

Frozen, it answers a question nothing else can: was my plan right? Over a few months the differences accumulate into a pattern. If reality is consistently a little below the plan, something real is missing from your items — a small recurring cost you never entered, or an estimate that is optimistic. Ebbe shows that drift under the list, and it is the closest the application comes to telling you something you did not enter.

There is no earlier starting point for the first reading, so it shows no prediction.

How the projection finds its starting point

When Ebbe draws a range of months, it needs a balance for the first day of it. It takes the newest reading on or before that day and rolls it forward: add up every payment between the reading and the start of the range, and apply it.

If every reading you have is in the future — which happens if you look at a range that begins before you started using Ebbe — the oldest is used and rolled backwards instead, subtracting what lies between.

The consequence worth knowing: a reading corrects everything after it. If your projection has drifted, one fresh reading pulls the whole curve back onto the real number, without you having to find what was wrong.

Without a reading

A brand-new account starts with a zero reading dated the first of the current month. This gives the forecast a temporary starting point. Replace it with your real balance as soon as possible.

How often

Once a month is plenty, and matching it to a fixed day — the day after the salary, the first of the month — makes the comparison easier to read, because each reading is taken at the same point in the cycle.

There is a ceiling of 100 readings per budget, which is about eight years of monthly readings. If you ever reach it, pruning is how you make room without changing the forecast.