This release introduces a new Home screen and a new budget analysis engine that uses your transaction history to help you build and adjust your budget based on your actual spending.

🏠 New Home Screen

Beacon now opens to a dashboard showing:

• Free-to-Spend

• Recent Activity

• Upcoming Expenses

• Monthly spending

The Home screen works offline and provides direct access to the underlying transactions and Insights.

Upcoming Expenses can be displayed as a list or carousel, with options to view the rest of the month, the next 30 days, or the following month.

🧠 Budget Analysis & Recommendations

Beacon can now analyze your settled transaction history to identify income, recurring bills, and spending patterns, from weekly through annual schedules.

This is not generative AI. Beacon uses deterministic rules and calculations based on your transaction history, categories, amounts, and timing to generate recommendations.

The analysis is now used in three areas:

Budget Checkup

For existing budgets, Budget Checkup analyzes recent spending and identifies where your budget may have drifted from your actual spending.

Recommendations show the amount Beacon suggests changing, and you review and apply each recommendation individually. Nothing changes until you choose to apply it.

Budget Setup

New users are guided through building their budget after connecting their first bank account.

Beacon identifies income and recurring expenses, including amounts and pay schedules, and lets users add them to their budget with a tap. Progress is saved if setup is interrupted.

Recurring Expenses

The Home screen can surface recurring expenses that aren't currently represented in your budget, including the merchant, amount, and recurrence pattern.

Adding one creates a bucket with the suggested amount and funding schedule.

🧭 Navigation Improvements

• Insights is now available directly from the bottom navigation.

• The former Profile tab has been replaced with a side panel containing Profile, Subscription, Budgets, Funding Schedules, Rules, Archives, Settings, Feedback, Support, and other account options.

• New budgets can be created directly from the budget switcher.

• Long-pressing the profile icon provides a quick way to switch budgets.

⚡ Improvements & Fixes

• Saving a bucket now returns you to the screen you came from and displays the confirmation there.

• Transactions funded from an archived bucket now display the archived bucket's name instead of Free-to-Spend.

• Fixed an issue where the Spending From picker could double-count bucket moves.

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback and helping improve Beacon Budget 🚀

Shane at Beacon Budget

This release adds home-screen widgets for Free-to-Spend, improves bank connections and transaction syncing, and fixes several issues across transactions, reporting, and rules.

✨ What's New Home-Screen Widgets

Free-to-Spend is now available directly from your iOS or Android home screen, making it easier to check what you have available to spend without opening the app.

Faster Bank Picker

Connecting a bank is now faster and easier with:

• Search

• Section labels

• Bank logos

• Improved Plaid and MX routing

⚡ Improvements & Fixes

• More reliable transaction syncing, including recovery of some older transaction history

• Connected banks now display their last sync time immediately

• Fixed transactions incorrectly disappearing from Activity

• Report ranges for last month, last quarter, and last year now include the full final day

• Fixed an issue where creating a rule could split merchant names into overly broad matching keywords

💳 Subscription Updates

This release introduces the new Essentials and Premium plans.

Existing subscribers are grandfathered into their current pricing and their existing subscription is unchanged.

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback and helping improve Beacon Budget 🚀

Shane at Beacon Budget

✨ Improvements

Transactions — Fixed transaction lists occasionally jumping back to the top while editing or switching tabs.

Add Account Experience — Reaching your account limit now immediately shows upgrade options and guidance on archiving an existing connection if needed.

Onboarding Improvements — Polished onboarding and login experiences for new users.

Updated Branding — Android notifications now use the Beacon Budget branding.

🛠 Fixes

Improved messaging while accounts are still syncing for the first time.

Accounts & Connections

• Fixed several account connection and subscription edge cases.

• Fixed a scenario where adding an account could get stuck when account limits were reached.

• Fixed bucket creation flows when no buckets exist.

General — Various UI polish, reliability improvements, and bug fixes across the app.

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback and helping improve Beacon Budget 🚀

Shane at Beacon Budget

Beacon Budget Rebrand 🎉

DAS Budget is now Beacon Budget! Same app, same data, but with a fresh new look and name.

What’s changed:

• New app name and dark green icon

• Updated splash screens and in-app references

• Updated support and contact information

What’s New ✨ New Onboarding Flow 📱

We’ve introduced a multi-step onboarding experience for new users. Don't worry about finishing it in one go—your progress is saved between app launches.

Fixed Contributions 🪙

Need to save for something specific? We added a new contribution type for expenses and goals that evenly distributes a bucket target across your funding periods.

Silent Sync Improvements 🔄

Stay up to date without lifting a finger. Beacon Budget can now refresh transaction data automatically in the background when connected accounts update.

MX Web Support 🌐

For those who prefer a keyboard and mouse, MX accounts can now be connected and updated directly from our web app.

Improvements ⚡

• Improved how we handle MX connections for a more stable experience

Fixes 🛠

• Pending transactions no longer stick around after the posted transactions arrive

• If you try to allocate more than your Free-to-Spend allows, you’ll see a clear validation dialog explaining why.

• Fixed recurring funding estimates for interval schedules (like "every 4 weeks")

• Refresh buttons no longer get stuck after being tapped multiple times

• Squashed several sync and reliability edge cases

Thanks again to everyone providing feedback and helping shape Beacon Budget 🚀

Shane at Beacon Budget

Hey everyone and Happy New Year!

Big update for DAS Budget! 📊 We’ve added some highly requested features to help you manage your finances more easily.

New Features

Manage Rules — Create rules to automatically rename and recategorize both past and future transactions. Keep things tidy without the manual work! Split Transactions — Break finalized transactions into multiple categories and buckets for more precise tracking. What else is new:

Better Bucket Layout — Works cleanly across all device sizes. Notifications & Analytics Controls — Manage notifications and optionally share anonymous insights to help improve onboarding, account setup, and promotions. We’re excited about these changes, especially Rules and Split Transactions, which make organizing your spending easier than ever.

Looking ahead, we’re focusing on even more ways to help you track, visualize, and plan your finances — including historical reporting and income tracking, customizable recurring schedules, and a clearer home page overview.

We’ve released a new app update! While this release is primarily maintenance-focused, it improves stability and performance and lays the foundation for new features and improvements coming in future updates.

Some of the enhancements we’re planning include:

• Splitting out individual transactions into multiple categories for better tracking

• Customizable recurrence widgets for buckets and funding schedules

• Income tracking and monthly reports for expense/income comparisons

• A new home page feature to give you a clearer view of your finances

As always, we value community feedback — if you want to share your ideas or see what’s coming next, check out our Public Roadmap on our Canny board: https://dasbudget.canny.io

Thanks for being part of the journey — we can’t wait to share more as we continue building!

— The DAS Budget Team