Guides

Starting over, fixing a broken budget, and changing course

If you have used other budgeting tools you may be looking for a way to start fresh — a reset button, or a second budget to try a different approach in. Duration has neither, on purpose. This is not a missing feature; it is a consequence of how the app is built, and once you see why, the things you actually wanted from “start over” turn out to be a few ordinary actions you can take at any time, without losing a single day of your history.

The short answer

Nothing in Duration is locked, and nothing you do is destructive to your record. Balances are never stored as fixed numbers — every figure you see is worked out, on demand, from the list of things that have actually happened. Structure (horizons, buckets, accounts) is cheap to change and changing it never rewrites the past. So there is no state to “get stuck” in, and therefore nothing to escape by starting again. You change course in place.

Why there is no “new plan” or reset

Two ideas make a reset unnecessary — and, if it existed, misleading.

Your money is one real thing. Your accounts hold what they hold. A “second budget” that also claimed to describe the same real Swedbank account would be a second, competing story about money that only exists once — and the moment the two disagreed, neither could be trusted. Duration keeps one legible picture of your money precisely so that the picture is always the truth. That single picture is the product.

Your history is an asset, not baggage. Because every balance is derived from your journal, the record of what happened is what makes the app work at all — it is how last month’s numbers, this month’s numbers, and a goal’s projected balance are all computed. Throwing it away to feel tidy would throw away the thing of value.

So instead of starting over, you do one or more of the following.

Restructure without losing anything

You are free to change the shape of your budget whenever it stops fitting.

Retire a bucket or account you no longer use by archiving it. Its history stays on the record and it disappears from your everyday lists, selects and the sweep. Archiving is only allowed at a zero balance, so you empty it first (spend it, or move its intent elsewhere) and then set it aside cleanly.
Rename a bucket, account, horizon or goal at any time. The name is just a label; changing it rewrites nothing.
Re-home a bucket to a different horizon when its time frame changes. This is recorded as a dated move, so the over-time report shows the change honestly as a lag rather than pretending the bucket always lived there.
Reorder or re-rank your horizons as your risk ladder evolves.

If a whole area of your budget has gone stale — an old set of buckets from a project that is finished, or a structure you set up before you understood your own horizons — archive that cluster and build the new shape beside it. The old record remains queryable; your going-forward view is clean.

Re-think your allocations

Much of what feels like “my budget is broken” is really “my intentions no longer match my life.” In Duration, allocation is intent, not money — allocating moves no cash, it just says what a krona is for. So re-thinking is free:

Simply re-allocate. Move intent out of buckets that no longer deserve it and into the ones that do. Nothing about your accounts changes.
If you allocate more than has arrived, ready-to-allocate is allowed to go negative. That red figure is an honest signal (“you have promised money you do not yet have”), not an error to be worked around — it resolves as income lands or as you pull intent back.
Overspending a bucket shows the same way: a red, within-horizon “rebalance your buckets” signal. It is telling you to move intent between buckets, and it never quietly hides the overspend.

Correct mistakes

The journal being append-only does not mean you are trapped behind a typo.

Edit an amount, date or account on a transaction in place. A correction keeps the original date, so your as-of history reflects the corrected truth.
Delete a transaction (a soft delete you can restore), or permanently remove ones you are certain about.
Re-categorise a transaction into a different bucket. Because the cash fact is untouched, a statement you already reconciled still matches.

Drawing a clean line

Sometimes you genuinely want a fresh start line — “from today, this is my real setup.” You can draw that line yourself right now: archive the structure you have outgrown, stand up the buckets and horizons you actually want, seed opening balances if it helps, and carry on. Your history before the line stays intact and out of your way; everything after it reflects the considered setup. A first-class “re-baseline marker” that names such a line explicitly may come later, but you do not have to wait for it to change course today.

When you really do have separate money

There is one case that is not “starting over”: when you are stewarding a genuinely separate pot of money — a side venture, or a family member’s finances — with its own real accounts. That is not a second take on the same money; it is a second book. Duration is designed so that this becomes a separate workspace you switch between, each with its own clean picture, rather than parallel budgets layered over one set of accounts. That capability is planned but not yet switched on; for now Duration keeps the single picture it does best.

The principle underneath all of this: Duration keeps one legible picture of your money, and lets you change course within it. You are never asked to choose between keeping your history and moving on — you keep both.