Getting started
Ten minutes of setup, and Atom Budget can tell you what every paycheck has to cover before the money feels spendable. Here is the path.
1. Create your account
Sign up with your email and a password, or continue with Google. Either way the account is free, and everything in this guide works without connecting a bank or entering a card.
Worth doing early: turn on two-factor authentication in Settings once you are in. It adds a six-digit code from your phone on top of your password, and for an app that will hold your financial picture, that is the right trade. Codes come from any authenticator app.
2. Add your income first
Start with your paycheck, because everything else in the app is measured against it. When you add an income, the schedule is the important part. Atom Budget takes schedules seriously, so pick the one that is actually true:
- Weekly, on whichever days you choose.
- Every two weeks, anchored to a real payday. This is the schedule with the famous three-paycheck months, and the app accounts for them automatically.
- Twice a month, on two fixed days such as the 15th and the last day. This is not the same as every two weeks, and Atom Budget is one of the few budgeting apps that treats them differently, because they are different.
- Monthly, quarterly, or yearly, for everything from salaries to annual bonuses.
3. Add your bills
Add each recurring expense the same way: name, amount, and its real schedule. Rent is monthly, insurance might be quarterly, the car registration is yearly. Do not convert anything to monthly in your head. The whole point is that the app does that arithmetic, and does it per paycheck rather than per month.
Categories and colours are yours to define, and a notes field is there for anything worth remembering, like a confirmation number or the date you last renegotiated the bill.
4. Read the allocation view
This is the screen that makes Atom Budget different. For each paycheck, the app shows how much is already claimed by bills that have not arrived yet, and how much is genuinely free. A yearly bill claims a little from every check all year, so that when it lands, the money is already set aside and nothing about that month feels like an emergency.
If the free number is smaller than you expected, that is not the app being pessimistic. It is the honest cost of your commitments, spread over the checks that have to carry them.
5. Optional: connect your bank
If you have access to the paid tier, connecting your bank lets Atom Budget read your recurring bills and income from your actual statements and offer them for import, instead of asking you to type them. The connecting your bank guide covers what that does and does not share.