I was thinking about how to enable others to create rules, and as much as I would have loved to enable you guys to write scripts or use regex, the majority of people would take one look and never come back again! Then I thought people actually have experience with writing email rules, so I decided to piggyback on this experience that most of us share.

Here's what happens: you set up your rules manually, but they automatically execute every day. If there's a match, you get an email about what we executed successfully for you, and how many transactions are still remaining that you need to process.

The automated email you get is very important. Hiding what is happening in a zero-based budget would defeat the purpose of zero-based budgeting. Half the value comes from you being in total awareness of the state of your budget.

Rules process top to bottom just like email filters. You can search the description of a transaction with equals, contains, starts with and ends with. You can filter on the amount with equals, greater than, less than, and between.

You write the rules for your own custom buckets. You know exactly why that Starbucks charge went to "Coffee" instead of "Meals."

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/62HEPPJ

Bonus Hack: New users hit the cold start problem - it takes months to understand your spending patterns with zero-based budgeting. So I built a hidden "coach mode" (just type "coach" on the main dashboard) that creates 2 prior months of budgets and gets your transactions. Instead of waiting 3 months to see your patterns emerge, you can do 3 months of budgeting in your first 2-hour session.

This is hidden because it needs explaining - you have to start budgeting from the earliest month and work forward, although the app naturally wants to drop you into the current month. For newcomers, it's a game-changer for quickly understanding where their money actually goes.

Bootstrapping this from zero, it's time for this rubber to hit the road so would love your feedback. I share my journey and decision-making process on X https://x.com/Volt3264