BudgetPilot Is Now Available on iOS and Android

We did not build a companion app that shows three charts and then tells you to open a laptop. The point of shipping mobile was to make the parts you touch most often reachable when you are not at a desk.

On iPhone and Android you get:

• Workspaces — switch between personal, freelance, business, or household contexts without logging out.
• Transactions — review what came in, fix a category, add something you paid in cash before you forget it.
• Budgets — see what is left in a category this period instead of guessing.
• Goals — track progress toward the thing you are actually saving for.
• Insights — recurring charges, category drift, and period comparisons summarized rather than dumped.
• Imports — upload a bank statement PDF or CSV, or photograph a receipt, and review the parsed result before it lands.

The web app remains the best place for first-time setup, bulk edits, and wide reporting. Big tables are simply better on a big screen, and we are not going to pretend a phone is the right tool for reconciling six months of history.

Most people install a budgeting app for the charts and stay for the separation.

A workspace is a container: its own accounts, its own budgets, its own categories, its own reports. Your freelance income does not inflate your household spending. Your grocery run does not quietly become a business expense. You are not maintaining two apps or two spreadsheets to keep those stories straight.

That matters more than it sounds. When personal and business money share one ledger, every number becomes an argument. Your profit is wrong because it includes your rent. Your personal savings rate is wrong because it includes a client payment you have not paid tax on yet. We wrote about the cleanup in separating personal and business expenses, and about the underlying idea in what is a financial workspace.

On mobile, switching workspaces is a couple of taps. That was the part we were most careful about, because a workspace you enter by accident is worse than no workspace at all.

Bank data arrives in whatever format your bank feels like giving you. Usually that is a PDF you cannot do anything useful with.

BudgetPilot accepts statement PDFs, CSV exports, and photos of receipts. Uploads are parsed and shown to you as a preview — dates, descriptions, amounts, suggested categories — before anything is written into a workspace. You approve or fix it first. We would rather you spend fifteen seconds checking than discover a mangled decimal separator three months later.

Because PDF import works, you often do not need to convert anything at all. If you do need a spreadsheet for an accountant or a lender, converting a bank statement PDF to CSV walks through the safe ways to do it and the errors to look for afterward.

On mobile this becomes genuinely useful for receipts. Paper receipts have a half-life of about two days in a jacket pocket. Photographing one when you get it is the only reliable version of that habit.

The design target for mobile was a check that takes less than a minute.

Budgets answer one question: is there room left in this category for what I am about to do? Not "here is a treemap of your annual spend." Just the number.

Goals answer a different one: is the thing I am saving for still moving? A goal you can see progress on survives a bad month. A goal that lives only in your head does not.

Insights handle the part nobody does voluntarily — spotting that a subscription price went up, that a category is running 30% hotter than last period, that something recurring is about to hit. If you run a business, that same view is where software costs stop being invisible; see tracking tax-deductible SaaS subscriptions.

None of this replaces sitting down with your numbers properly. It replaces not looking at them for five weeks. If you want a structured version of the sit-down, we published a ten-minute Sunday cash flow routine that is built to survive a busy month.

We would rather tell you the direction than promise dates we might miss.

Deeper import coverage. More statement layouts parsed correctly on the first try, with fewer manual column fixes. This is unglamorous work and it is where a lot of our time goes.

Better recurring detection. Catching renewals that change amount or interval, not just the clean monthly ones.

Reporting that travels. Period reports you can hand to an accountant, a landlord, or a lender without rebuilding them in a spreadsheet.

More collaboration polish. Shared workspaces work today. Roles, invitations, and notifications around them can be smoother.

Localization. The blog already speaks several languages. The product should catch up.

What we are not going to do is bolt on features that make the daily check slower. The reason people abandon budgeting tools is maintenance cost, not missing features — a pattern we dug into in why most budgeting apps fail for real people.

A suggested first hour, based on watching people do this badly (including us):

1. Install and sign in with your existing account, or create one on the web if you are new. 2. Set up one workspace, not five. Pick the messiest part of your financial life — usually freelance or shared household money — and start there. 3. Import one statement. One month is enough to see whether categorization matches how you think. 4. Create one budget and one goal. Two numbers you will actually recognize beat twelve you invented for the demo. 5. Open the app once mid-week. That is the habit. Everything else is setup.

If something is wrong — a statement that parses badly, a category that keeps guessing wrong, a screen that feels slow — tell us at support@budgetpilot.ai. Launch week is when that feedback is worth the most.

Curious before installing? How BudgetPilot works covers the model, the demo lets you poke at it, and pricing is where the plans live. Thanks for waiting on iOS. It is out.