Budget
Requires the optional Monarch Money integration — with nothing configured, this screen shows a demo budget so the layout is still browsable.
Locked by default
Unlike the rest of the wall, Budget isn't login-free — finances stay visible on the kitchen wall, but opening the tab asks for a parent's PIN first (same PIN as the Companion PWA). It re-locks after about 15 minutes. Which members can unlock it is configured via BUDGET_UNLOCK_MEMBERS in .env (defaults to dad,mom) — see self-hosting.
The hero number
The big number is safe to spend: total budgeted minus total spent, across every category — a true net, not a sum of only the categories still in the black. A category that's over budget, or spending with no budget set at all, both pull the number down instead of being hidden from it. If the household's genuinely over for the period, the number goes negative and turns red ("over budget") rather than floor at zero.
Below it, an updated _ ago caption shows the sidecar's last successful sync. Past 24 hours old (This Month only — see below), it switches to a warning treatment: Monarch has no official API, so the sidecar's login can silently start failing, and a stale-but-confident-looking number is worse than an obviously-stale one.
Category rows
Sorted biggest spend first. Each row shows the category's spent-vs-budget bar and either "$_ left" or "$_ over."
This Month / Last Month / Year to Date
The segmented control at top switches between three periods:
| Period | Source |
|---|---|
| This Month | The sidecar's current live snapshot — always available once Monarch is configured |
| Last Month | The sidecar's history directory — only exists once it's run across a month boundary |
| Year to Date | Every captured month of the current year, summed per category, plus the live current month |
If a period genuinely hasn't been captured yet, the screen says so plainly ("Not tracked yet") rather than showing demo numbers under a real-sounding label — a fabricated "Last Month" would be worse than an honest blank one.
History starts accumulating once Monarch is connected
The sidecar mirrors each live sync into data/monarch-history/<YYYY-MM>.json alongside the current-month snapshot it always wrote. Last Month shows up the first time the sidecar has run in a completed calendar month — there's no backfill, since Monarch doesn't expose historical budget data.