Envelopes

Envelopes turns your Obsidian vault into a personal finance tracker. It is an envelope budgeting app — sometimes called zero-based budgeting, or "give every dollar a job" — built for people who would rather keep their money in plain Markdown than in another cloud service.

Track expenses, budget your monthly income, import bank and credit card CSV exports, watch your cash flow, and see exactly where your money goes each month. No accounts, no subscription, no bank connection: your financial data stays in your vault as plain text files you own.

What it does

• Envelope budgeting — set a monthly budget target per spending category, watch each envelope drain as you spend, and roll leftover money forward to next month.
• Expense tracking — log spending from a quick-entry pane. Every expense is its own note with date, cost, vendor, and category frontmatter, so it stays searchable, linkable, and yours.
• Bank CSV import — drop checking account, credit card, or debit card exports into an import folder. Transactions are parsed, deduplicated against what you already have, and filed automatically.
• Bills and recurring charges — track subscriptions, rent, utilities, and loan payments, match them to vendors, and see what is still outstanding this month.
• Income and cash flow — record each paycheck, split it across envelopes, and see how much money is actually left to spend.
• Payment methods — tag spending by the card, bank account, or cash it came out of.
• Pace — compare current spending against where you should be this far into the month, so overspending shows up before payday rather than after.

Why plain files

Everything lives in your vault: expenses, income, budgets, and bills are Markdown notes and tables. That means your personal finances are versionable with git, greppable, editable by hand, portable to any other tool, and still readable in ten years. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Usage

Open the Envelopes pane from the ribbon (piggy bank icon) or the command palette (Open envelopes). Set your monthly budget targets per category, then either log expenses by hand or drop a CSV export into your import folder.

Folders for expenses, income, and imports are configurable in the plugin settings.

Installation

Install from the Obsidian community plugins browser, or download the latest release and copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/envelopes/.

Development

npm install
npm run dev    # watch build
npm run build  # production build (type-check + minify)
npm run lint

Keywords

personal finance, budget, budgeting app, envelope budgeting, zero-based budgeting, expense tracker, spending tracker, money manager, cash flow, savings, bills, subscriptions, income tracking, bank CSV import, credit card import, finance tracker, Obsidian plugin.

License

MIT