If you're paid on the 15th and the last day of the month, you've probably tried to make a budgeting app match your pay cycle and quietly given up. You set it to monthly and it resets on the 1st, halfway through a pay period. You set it to biweekly and it looks right for a month, then slowly slides off your paydays until the budget resets on a Tuesday for no reason at all.
That isn't your setup being wrong. Those two things genuinely aren't the same, and the difference compounds.
Biweekly is 26 periods. Semi-monthly is 24.
Biweekly means every 14 days. Anchor it to Wednesday 15 July and the next period starts on 29 July, then 12 August, then 26 August. Semi-monthly means twice per calendar month — the 15th and the 30th, every month, forever.
Over a year that's 26 periods against 24. Over a few months the drift is obvious: a biweekly budget anchored to your 15 July payday starts its next period on 29 July, but your actual next payday is the 30th. By October the two are more than a week apart. You end up mentally translating between "what the app says I have left" and "what I actually have left until I'm paid again", which is precisely the arithmetic you downloaded a budgeting app to stop doing.
Roughly a fifth of US private-sector workers are paid semi-monthly, and it's the dominant schedule for salaried staff across much of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. It is not a niche. It's just one most budgeting apps skipped, because two periods per calendar month is genuinely more awkward to implement than "every 14 days".
What Pocket Clear does now
Pick two boundary days and the whole app follows them.
- Two periods per calendar month, on the days you choose. Defaults to the 1st and the 16th; set them to whatever your payslip says.
- Home, Reports and All Transactions all use it. Not just one screen — the period selector, the totals, the daily chart and the navigation arrows all move in the same two-period rhythm.
- Budgets can use it too. A monthly grocery limit that resets on the 1st is useless if you're paid on the 15th. Set the budget period to semi-monthly and the limit resets on payday instead.
- Short months are handled. Choose the 31st and February falls back to the 28th (29th in a leap year), then returns to the 31st in March. No gaps, no overlapping periods, no days that belong to neither.
- It's free. The view period costs nothing; budgets remain a Pro feature as before.
The awkward month-end cases, spelled out
Most of the work in a feature like this isn't the common case — it's the edges, and they're the reason it's often skipped.
If you pick the 15th and the 31st, April has no 31st. Pocket Clear clamps that boundary to the 30th, so the second April period runs 15–30 April and the next begins 1 May. Pick the 29th and 30th and February collapses both onto the 28th — so instead of producing a zero-length period, the two boundaries merge and the month has one period rather than two. Every day of the year belongs to exactly one period, on every month length, in leap years and out of them.
We tested that property directly rather than by inspection: every possible pair of boundary days, across four years of months, checking that the periods tile the calendar with no gaps and no overlaps. It's the kind of thing that looks obviously fine and isn't.
One deliberate limitation
Your two boundary days are stored on your device and aren't synced. If you use Pocket Clear on a phone and a tablet, set them in both places.
That's a trade-off rather than an oversight. Your view period is a display preference — like dark mode or text size — and syncing it would mean one device silently changing how another one looks. In Partner Mode it would be worse: your partner's phone would start reorganising itself around your pay cycle. Your transactions, budgets and categories all sync as usual; only the window you view them through stays local.
How to turn it on
Settings → View Period → Semi-monthly, then set your two days. For budgets, Settings → Budgets → Budget Period → Semi-monthly. Both take effect immediately and change nothing about your existing data — semi-monthly is a different window onto the same transactions, not a different way of storing them. Switch back to monthly whenever you like and everything reads exactly as it did before.
Full details: how View Period works and how Budget Period works.
Why we built it
A user wrote in explaining that she's paid on the 15th and the 30th, had tried the biweekly setting, and watched it drift off her paydays within a couple of months. She wasn't asking for a feature so much as checking whether she'd misunderstood the settings.
She hadn't. The setting she needed didn't exist. It does now.