An alert is Finthy telling you something about a budget while you can still act on it. Alerts are per budget, not a global setting.
Turning them on
Alerts are configured on the budget itself, not in Settings. When you create or edit a budget:
- Enable Alerts, which turns them on for that budget.
- Alert Threshold, a whole number from 0 to 100. It is the percentage of the budget at which Finthy speaks up, phrased in the form “alert when spending reaches”.
So one budget can warn you at 50% while another stays quiet until 90%. Editing several budgets at once can set the threshold across all of them.
The five types
- Threshold warning: you crossed the threshold you chose. “You’ve spent 60% of your Groceries budget (50% threshold reached).”
- Approaching limit: you are nearly out. “Your Groceries budget is almost spent. Only 40.00 remaining.”
- Budget exceeded: you went past the limit, and by how much. “Your Groceries budget has been exceeded by 25.00.”
- Period ending: the period is about to roll over, with how many days are left. Useful when something was going to be bought anyway.
- Rollover: what carried into the next period. Read the next section, because this one has two faces.
A rollover alert is not always good news
If the budget had money left, the alert is congratulatory: an amount is rolling over into the next period.
If the budget was over, the same alert type tells you the budget was over by an amount and that it will be deducted from your next period. A rollover budget carries deficits forward as faithfully as surpluses, so the next period starts smaller. This is the single most surprising budget behaviour in Finthy and the reason rollover deserves a thought before you enable it.
The alerts list
Each budget shows its Recent Alerts, with View All Alerts for the rest. The full list has:
- A count of how many alerts there are.
- All and Unread filters.
- Mark as read, and Mark all as read when you want a clean slate.
- Deleting an alert, if you would rather it were gone than read.
- Per alert: the type, the amount Spent, the Budget amount, and Progress as a percentage.
When there is nothing unread, Finthy says you are all caught up rather than showing an empty table.
Where alerts reach you
In Finthy, always. They appear whether or not you want email, and they cannot be turned off per budget; what the budget controls is whether its thresholds generate them at all.
By email, if you have asked for it. That is the single Send me email notifications toggle in Settings > Notifications, which covers events, budgets and matches together. There is no budget-only email switch.
Not as a push notification. There is no Finthy app in the App Store or Google Play, so there is nothing to push to. Native apps are on our roadmap and device notifications will arrive with them.
Good to know
- A budget has its own currency. It is tracked in that currency rather than converted to your default, so a budget set in one currency reports its limit, its spend and its alerts in that same currency.
- Alerts follow spending, not the calendar, except for Period ending. Nothing arrives because time passed; something arrives because money moved.
- A duplicate does not trigger an alert. Marking a transaction as a duplicate takes it out of budget totals, so it cannot push a budget over on its own.