Every BudgeFlow SMS Command, Explained

The default shape is amount + free-text description. Send "12.50 starbucks coffee" and BudgeFlow extracts $12.50, identifies Starbucks as the merchant, and routes it to your Dining envelope. Natural-language forms like "spent 45 on gas at shell" or "$14.99 netflix #entertainment" work too — keywords like *spent*, *paid*, *bought*, *for*, and *at* are all parsed.

To log income, start with a + or the word "income": "+2000 salary" or "income 850 freelance". Anything after the amount becomes the source label.

Any #category hashtag overrides the AI guess. Use it once and the merchant is remembered for next time. To remove the last entry within 60 seconds, just reply "undo".

Five one-word commands cover almost every check-in:

• balance — net across all your tracked accounts
• summary — month-to-date income, expenses, net, and top three categories
• budget — every active envelope with spent / allocated and a marker on any that are over
• today — every entry from today with a running total
• week / month — rolling 7-day and month-to-date views by category

Replies are tuned to fit in a single SMS segment whenever possible — that keeps cost and latency predictable.

IOU commands use names exactly the way you'd say them out loud:

• "i owe alex 25 for movies" — creates an open IOU you owe
• "alex owes me 40 for dinner" — mirror
• "paid alex 25" — settles oldest IOUs first (FIFO), splits partial payments automatically
• "alex paid me 25" — same FIFO settlement for amounts coming back
• "split 200 between me, mark, priya for dinner" — divides evenly and creates reciprocal IOUs
• "balances" — your net position with everyone in one shot
• "how much do i owe alex?" / "how much does alex owe me?" — per-contact balance

Contacts are created on first mention with name normalization, so "Alex", "alex", and " Alex " all resolve to the same person.

Most of personal finance is repetitive — these shortcuts cover the parts that come back every week or month.

• goal vacation +100 — contribute to a named goal
• save 250 to emergency — same idea, fuzzy-matches the goal name
• bill paid rent — closes the next upcoming instance of a recurring bill and logs the linked expense
• recurring — lists upcoming recurring charges over the next 14 days
• net worth — current net worth plus the 30-day delta
• mileage 14 client visit — log deductible miles against the active mileage rate
• convert 50 eur to usd — daily FX conversion
• report q1 — generate a PDF report and email it to your account address

help returns a short cheatsheet — useful when you're onboarding a partner or family member. STOP is the standard US-carrier unsubscribe keyword and pauses all SMS; START re-enables. You can also flip the channel in Settings → SMS.

All commands above also work over WhatsApp, plus a few WhatsApp-only extras (photo receipt OCR, scheduled reminders, inline split shortcuts). See the WhatsApp explainer for details.