Your bank balance is not what you can spend.

What it looks like

A made-up one-van plumbing business, three ordinary months ending today: lumpy jobs, rent on the 1st, the owner paid a steady $4,000 on the 5th, van insurance every three months, and a quarter of what comes in set aside for tax.

Spending the bank balance would have spent the IRS's money and next month's rent. Over the next 13 weeks their cash is lowest the week of October 3, at $24,082.16 — and they can see that today.

Those figures are worked out by the same code you would be running, on a made-up business. Yours will look nothing like them -- that is rather the point.

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What it does

One number you can act on.

Cash in your accounts, less every bill due in the next 30 days, less the money you have set aside, less the cushion you never want to go under. Every piece of the working is on the screen, so you never have to trust a figure you cannot check.

Tax set aside as the money comes in, not in April.

A share of every dollar that actually comes in is put to one side the moment it lands -- a slow month sets aside less by itself -- and it tells you the date of your next quarterly estimated payment and what is waiting for it. Your percentage, your call; it does the arithmetic and says so.

Your business and your household, one tap apart.

Two separate budgets that never mix, and the one line that joins them: the pay you take out of the business is the household's income. Set a steady amount on the business side and the household budget knows what it has to live on, even when sales are lumpy.

The next 13 weeks, before they happen.

Your cash week by week for the next quarter: the bills you know about, the money you usually take in, the spending you usually do. The week it gets tight is flagged before you get there. Wondering about a hire or a truck payment? Put it in, see the weeks move, and nothing is saved until you mean it.

It works from your bank's own file.

Download a statement from your bank's website -- US banks offer CSV or QFX -- and bring it in. No bank password handed to anybody, no connection that breaks every few weeks. The same file twice adds nothing, and anything it cannot sort is left for you rather than guessed. Sort a payee once and it offers to do it every time after.

A budget that bends.

Plan a category as dollars or as a share of what came in. Let what is left carry into next month, or start every month clean. Change one month without touching the rest. A bill that comes once a year is budgeted a month at a time, so the money is there when it lands.

January is already done.

Every business category knows which line of Schedule C it belongs on, so the year comes out sorted the way your accountant asks for it, and everything downloads as a spreadsheet whenever you want it.

Just the household? Pick that when it asks and it is a plain, flexible monthly budget -- bills, groceries, savings goals and what is left -- with the same cash forecast and none of the business pages.

What it is not

• It is not accounting software and it does not do your taxes. It does not file anything, send invoices or run payroll. It is the budget -- what is coming, what is spoken for and what is left.
• It does not connect to your bank. That is deliberate: you download the file, so nobody else ever holds your banking password.
• It does not guess. A transaction that no rule of yours matches is left for you, because a wrong guess looks finished and nobody checks what already looks done.