Clearing out the past
Remove finished items and old readings without changing the forecast from your chosen date onward.
Past entries remain visible even though Ebbe is built for looking ahead: last year’s holiday, a phone that has been paid off, or several years of balance readings. Over time, those finished records make the lists longer without changing the future forecast.
Pruning removes only what is safely over. You will find it in its own red-bordered block under Settings → Budget, ready when you want to tidy up or need room below a limit.
The guarantee
The forecast from the cutoff onwards comes out exactly as it did before.
That is the rule the whole operation is built to keep, and it is what makes pruning safe to press. Not “roughly the same”, not “close enough” — the same figures, to the cent.
Everything else follows from it. A one-off is only removable when its last payment is behind the cutoff, so an item still paying instalments stays even if it started years ago. A recurring item is only removable if it has an end date strictly before the cutoff — an open-ended item is never past, however old, because it is still costing you money. A balance reading on the cutoff stays, because it is the anchor the remaining projection is measured from.
If Ebbe cannot prove something is over, it keeps it.
Doing it
- Settings → Budget, scroll to the pruning block.
- Choose a cutoff date. It defaults to the first of the current month, which is the conservative choice.
- Optionally switch on also delete empty categories — categories that have nothing left under them after the prune.
- Press Prune and confirm. The confirmation names the date.
Ebbe reports what it removed.
Tag settings whose tag no longer appears on any item are cleared up at the same time, since a budget for a tag nothing carries is a setting about nothing.
Choosing a cutoff
There is no right answer, only a trade-off.
An early cutoff — two or three years back — removes almost nothing and is close to pointless. A late cutoff — last month — removes the most, and costs you the history that makes the balance-reading comparison meaningful.
A reasonable habit is to prune to about a year back, once a year. That keeps a full cycle of readings for the drift figure to be built from, and clears out the holidays and repairs of the year before that.
It cannot be undone
There is no “unprune”. Export your budget first — it takes one click and the file is the whole thing. See backing up.
When a ceiling is reached
Every budget has limits: 500 recurring items, 2,000 one-offs, 100 categories, 100 balance readings, 200 tag settings.
If you meet one, Ebbe refuses the new item and the message links straight here, because pruning is almost always the right response — the ceiling is usually a sign of accumulated past rather than a genuinely enormous household. Only new rows are refused; you can always delete or prune your way back under.