Income, paydays, and refunds

Money leaving your accounts always has an envelope. Money arriving has a question instead: which month is it for? Get comfortable with that one question and paydays, odd income, and refunds all have obvious answers.

Logging a paycheck

A paycheck is a transaction like any other: log it to the account it landed in, categorized as Income. It shows up in available to budget, and from there you do the only job income ever has in Climb: assign it to envelopes until available to budget reads zero. Rent, groceries, savings, fun. Every dollar has a destination; a paycheck is just a batch of dollars that haven't been told theirs yet.

This works the same for any money coming in: salary, a side gig payout, birthday cash. If it's new money, it's Income.

The month a paycheck funds

Income in Climb is filed against a month, not just a date. Most of the time those match: the paycheck that lands mid-July is income for July, and it funds July's envelopes.

But you get to choose. Point a paycheck that lands on July 28th at August, and it won't touch July's math at all: it waits, and on August 1st it's already sitting in available to budget, ready to fund the month before the month has spent a dime. That choice is the whole mechanism for getting ahead: the further your paydays drift from the month they fund, the less any single payday matters. Make it automatic with the income buffer and your runway does this for you: income lands in the buffer, and the buffer funds the following month.

Refunds go back where they came from

Return the milk, cancel the subscription mid-cycle, get a warranty payout on the blender: that money goes back into the envelope it originally left, not into Income. Log it as a positive amount in the same category, Groceries for the milk, and the envelope simply gets its money back.

Why not Income? Because a refund isn't new money; it's old spending being undone. Send it through Income and two things quietly break: your spending history says you spent more on groceries than you really did, and your income history says you earned more than you really did. Put it back in its envelope and both stay true, and the envelope can spend it again like the purchase never happened.

The same logic covers store credit used later, reimbursements from a friend for their half of dinner, and rebates: money that undoes spending returns to the envelope that did the spending.