Glossary

Look up the terms Ebbe uses for money, forecasts, accounts, and access.

This glossary explains the terms Ebbe uses in forms, forecasts, and account settings. For familiar words with a specific meaning here, that meaning is the one described below.

The money

Anchor — the balance reading a projection is measured from. The newest one on or before the first day of the range, rolled forward to it. See the anchor.

Balance reading — what your account actually held on a given day, entered by you. The one figure in Ebbe that cannot be derived from anything else.

Buffer — the amount you want your balance to stay above. The only threshold in the application, and the thing “it gets tight” is measured against. See the buffer.

Closing balance — the projected balance at the end of a month, after everything in it. What the Balance column shows.

Drift — whether your plan has been running ahead of reality or behind it, across the balance readings you have taken.

Fixed-cost ratio — what share of your income is already committed. Shown on the forecast and on the analysis screen; absent when there is no income to compare against.

Horizon — how many months the projection runs for. 12, 24, 36 or 60.

Net — a month’s income minus its spending. Not the balance: the change.

The things you enter

Estimate — an amount marked as a guess rather than a commitment. Counted in full; it puts a ≈ on the item and on any month containing one. See estimates.

Instalment — one of several payments a single one-off item is split into.

Item — anything you entered that costs or earns money. Recurring or one-off.

Occurrence — one payment of one item on one day. What an item expands into, and what the exports list.

One-off item — something with a date rather than a rhythm, whether it is paid once or in instalments.

Paused — an item that produces no payments at all while the switch is on. Not zero: nothing.

Raise — a rule that increases an amount each year, by a percentage or a fixed sum. See raises.

Recurring item — something that repeats on a rhythm.

Rhythm — how often a recurring item falls due. Either every N days, or on a given day of certain months. See rhythms.

The groupings

Archived — a category kept for its history but taken out of the pickers.

Category — what kind of spending something is. One per item, or none.

Tag — what something belongs to. Several per item, or none, and it cuts across categories. See categories and tags.

Tag budget — a target amount for a tag, measured over a period: total, per month, per year, or the next rolling twelve months.

Uncategorised — items with no category. They collect on a page of their own, which is where items go when a category is deleted.

The account

Administrator — an account that can manage other accounts and Ebbe’s system settings, but never sees anybody’s figures.

Demo — an anonymous account with the invented household in it, alive for an hour. See the demo household.

Operator — whoever runs Ebbe. The imprint and the privacy notice are assembled from the details they entered.

Pruning — removing what is safely in the past, with the guarantee that the forecast comes out exactly as before. See pruning.

The interfaces

MCP — the protocol an AI assistant uses to read and change your budget. See Ebbe and an assistant.

OAuth — how an application somebody else wrote asks for permission without ever seeing your password. See letting an application in.

Scope — what a credential may do. There are two: read, and write, which implies read.

Token — a credential you create for a program of your own. See tokens and scopes.