Almost every budgeting app asks you for one number per category and then holds you to it twelve times a year. It's a reasonable simplification, and for some categories it's exactly right — rent doesn't care what month it is.
For a lot of the others it quietly falls apart. Gifts is enormous in December and near zero in March. Electricity peaks in whichever direction your climate goes hardest. Travel is a summer number. School costs land in one or two months and then vanish. Every one of those is a category where a single figure is wrong in both directions at once.
What people do instead is pick a number that's wrong on purpose. Either you set the December figure and coast under budget all year, learning nothing from a green bar you were never going to hit, or you set the honest average and watch the bar go red every December while you shrug and ignore it — which is worse, because a warning you've trained yourself to dismiss stops being a warning at all.
The third option is to go in and edit the limit every few months, which works right up until the month you forget.
Twelve amounts, set once
A monthly budget in Pocket Clear can now carry a different amount for each of the twelve months.
Open Settings › Budgets, tap the category, and turn on Different amount each month. The list of twelve months opens straight away, each one already filled in with the amount you'd typed above it — so you change December and August and leave the other ten alone. Close the list, tap Save, and you're done for the year.
- Every month starts from your main amount. You're not filling in a blank table of twelve — you're overriding the two or three that are genuinely different.
- Untouched months keep following it. Change the main amount later and every month you never edited moves with it. The ones you set by hand stay exactly where you put them.
- They repeat every year. The amounts are keyed to the calendar month, not to a particular year, so a December figure applies to every December until you change it.
- Handing a month back is one action. Clear its field and save, and it follows the main amount again.
- Rollover understands it. Carry-forward adds up each past month's own limit rather than repeating one figure.
The pre-fill is the design, not a convenience
It's tempting to read "each month starts pre-filled" as a nicety that saves typing. It's actually the thing that keeps the feature from becoming a maintenance burden.
The switch says it out loud: months you don't change follow the amount above. If instead the twelve months were independent copies of your limit, then raising a grocery budget for inflation would mean editing twelve fields instead of one — and you'd discover that six months later, when a stale February figure quietly under-reported you. Because untouched months follow the main amount rather than remembering a copy of it, the main amount stays the thing you adjust, and the overrides stay a short list of deliberate exceptions.
That's also why clearing a month's field is how you undo an override. You're not setting it to zero; you're saying "this month has nothing special about it any more", and it goes back to tracking the main amount. Every per-month figure has to be a real amount above zero — a blank entry means "follow the main amount", so there's no way to accidentally express "no budget at all" by leaving something empty.
Monthly only, and deliberately so
Per-month amounts apply to monthly budgets. If a budget's period is weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly or yearly, the switch isn't shown at all.
That's a real constraint rather than an unfinished edge, and there are two reasons for it.
The first is that "a different amount each month" is a sentence about the calendar — December, February, the twelve names everyone already has intuitions about. A semi-monthly budget has twenty-four periods a year that don't line up with month names, a weekly one has fifty-two, and asking you to fill in a table of fifty-two would be a worse feature than not having one.
The second is less obvious and more important. Calendar months are the same everywhere. Every other period type gets its boundaries from a device-local setting — which day your month starts on, which day your week starts on, where your fortnight is anchored — and those settings aren't synced between your devices, deliberately. A per-period amount keyed to boundaries that differ between your phone and your tablet would resolve to different limits on each. A month is a month on both.
Each budget carries its own period, so nothing stops you running rent monthly with December set separately while groceries run weekly on a flat limit.
Which number you see, and where
Once a budget varies, "what's my limit" needs a "when" attached to it. Pocket Clear answers with the amount in force for the period you're looking at.
Move Reports › Budgets back to last December and the limit on screen is December's, with the bar drawn against it. The summary card at the top of that tab adds up the same period-appropriate limits, so the roll-up matches the bars beneath it.
Two screens are deliberately anchored to now rather than to whatever you're browsing. The list in Settings › Budgets always shows the current month's amount — it's a settings screen, not a report. And the remaining-budget line under the category grid on Add Transaction is always the current month's figure too, since it's there to answer "how much room do I have right now".
What this does to rollover
Budget rollover carries unspent budget into the next period instead of resetting it to zero — and overspending too, so a period you blew through starts the next one smaller. That mechanism had a quiet assumption baked into it: that every past period had the same limit, so the carry-in could be computed from one number.
With varying amounts that assumption is gone, so the carry-in now adds up each period's own limit. A generous December and a lean February each count for what they actually were, rather than for whatever the current month happens to say. If you've been running rollover on a seasonal category, this is the difference between a carried-forward balance you can trust and one that drifts a little further off every year.
Rollover still starts counting from the moment you turn it on and never back-dates, exactly as before.
Getting started
Settings › Budgets → tap a category → make sure the period is Monthly → Different amount each month. To reopen the list of months afterwards, tap Monthly amounts under the switch on iPhone; on Android, switch the toggle off and back on.
Budgets are part of Pocket Clear Pro, and per-month amounts come with them, on both iPhone and Android. The twelve amounts travel with Cloud Sync, so a phone and a tablet agree — and if you're linked in Partner Mode, a partner's budgets still appear in Reports as read-only rows, resolved for the month you're viewing. The full walkthrough is in the help centre: A different amount each month.
The best time to do this is a quiet month. Set December now, while it's still August and you can think about it clearly, and it will be right every December from here on.
Give the expensive months the room they need
Pocket Clear Pro: one budget, twelve amounts, set once — and rollover that adds up each month's own limit.