SKY MATRIX · BUDGETSeamless global budgeting

Matrix Budget — User Manual

Your complete guide to using Matrix Budget: a private family-finance app that tracks accounts, credit cards, loans, budgets and assets in any currency, captures transactions automatically from bank SMS and app notifications, and reconciles against real bank statements.

Everything is stored on your device (plus your own cloud, if you enable sync). Questions or setup help? Email support@skymatrix.biz.

1. The basics

The month cycle

Your budget “month” doesn’t have to be a calendar month. In Settings → 1 · Month cycle you choose the day your cycle starts — typically your salary day. A cycle starting on the 25th runs from the 25th of one month to the 24th of the next, and is named after the month it ends in (25 Jun – 24 Jul = “July”). Day 1 gives plain calendar months. Pick this once at the start and stick with it: existing month sheets keep their data if you change it later, only future dates map differently.

The app always opens on the current cycle. New cycles are created automatically, carrying forward every balance, currency choice, and category budget (with actuals reset to zero).

Base currency

Settings → 2 · Base currency. Every total, balance and headline figure is displayed in this currency. Individual accounts, cards and assets can each use their own currency — the app converts automatically. Change the base any time; it’s display-only and fully reversible.

The header

The top of the app shows the active cycle (tap the dropdown to view past months, + Month to add one manually), the cycle date range, and three live figures: Income, Expenses, and Balance for the cycle. Add Transaction jumps straight to the entry form on the Expenses tab, and Save Now forces an immediate save/sync. Tapping the logo opens Settings.

2. Tabs, one by one

Dashboard

Your overview and nothing else: cash position, income vs expenses, the spending breakdown and your net position. Nothing on this screen changes a figure — entering transactions happens on Expenses, reachable in one tap from Add Transaction in the header.

Income

Income is a list of sources you define — Salary, Rental, Freelance, anything: - ✎ renames a source everywhere (including past transactions); × removes one (blocked while transactions still use it); + Add income source creates another. - Each source has a budget (what you expect) and received (what actually arrived). - The Realization Rate rings show each source’s progress and the overall percentage.

When you add income, the app asks which account to credit — it defaults to your primary account but any account works.

Budget

What you plan, in one place. Budget Allocation sets a cap per category and Income Targets sets what you expect to earn — the same card you see on the Income tab, so the two can never disagree.

Goals are what you are saving towards: a name, a target, and what you set aside each cycle. The set-aside is real — it is subtracted from what is available to budget, so a goal competes with your spending instead of being a wish written down somewhere.

Available for expenses answers two different questions and labels both. Left to budget is your income budget minus goals minus the budgets you have already set. Left this cycle is income actually received minus goals minus what you have actually spent. If you have budgeted more than you expect to earn once goals are set aside, it says so.

The Savings assistant reads this cycle’s own figures and tells you where the money went, which heads broke their budget and by how much, which heads have spending but no budget at all, and whether the cycle can fund your goals. It runs on the phone from your own records — nothing is uploaded and no outside service is called.

Expenses

What you actually did. Add Transaction sits at the top of this tab. Below it, spending per category tracked against the caps you set on the Budget tab, the Money moved subtotal, and every transaction of the cycle.

Category budgets with actual spending tracked against them. Rename (✎), remove (×), or + Add category freely. Budgets carry into each new month automatically and stay editable.

Two special categories are built in and protected: Credit cards and Loans. They track cash you send to cards and loans. Important accounting note: these are not counted in your Expenses total — a card purchase counts as spending (in its own category) at the moment you buy; paying the card bill later just moves money you already spent. Counting both would double-count. Card interest is real spending and posts to MISC.

Liabilities

Credit cards — outstanding balance, limit, utilisation bar, and available credit shown in the card’s own currency. If you ever pay more than you owe (a top-up), the app asks for confirmation and the excess is held as a green “In credit (prepaid)” balance — your next purchases consume it first, and your available spending power correctly exceeds the limit meanwhile.

Loans — outstanding and original amounts. + Add loan (in Settings → 4 · Loans) records a proper disbursement: the borrowed money lands in the account you choose and the liability rises with it, so your net worth doesn’t jump. Loan payments reduce the loan and your account together.

Savings

All your bank accounts and cash. Each row: rename (✎), remove (×), balance (editable, typed in the account’s own currency), and a currency dropdown. + Add account for new ones. “Cash” is your cash-in-hand account — ATM withdrawals land here automatically.

Assets

Free-form list for anything else you own — property, gold, investments, policies. Each with its own name, value, currency, and remove button. Total assets = cash + banks + these items. Everything carries forward monthly.

Forex

• Exchange rates — every tracked currency with an editable rate (1 unit = X QAR). + Add currency accepts any 3-letter code (INR, TRY, JPY, …); leave the rate blank to fetch it live. × removes a currency (blocked while any account/card/asset uses it or it’s your base).
• Fetch Live Rates updates every tracked currency at once from a free rate service.
• Quick Converter and reference tables for 100/1,000/10,000 conversions.
• Currency Assignments shows which of your items are in which currency.

New currencies work everywhere immediately: account dropdowns, base-currency choices, even SMS amount detection.

Consolidation

The month-end jobs, together: bank statement import, the month-end audit, reconciliation against what the bank says, and Ask your ledger.

Ask your ledger

Answers questions about your own records. Set any combination of From / To dates, Type (spending, income, transfers, card payments, refunds, loan payments or money received from a loan), Category, a single account, card or loan, a currency, or text that a merchant name contains — then tap Answer. Group by category, type, currency, account, day or month to get subtotals instead of a flat list.

Exclude answers the other half of the question. Excluding a type, a category or a currency leaves everything else in — “everything except transfers” used to mean picking every other type one at a time. Whatever you excluded is named on the answer, because an exclusion makes the total smaller and a smaller total with no explanation reads as a wrong one.

Five presets fill the form in one tap: This cycle, Last 7 days, Spending by category, By currency and Clear. The answer gives you a total, a breakdown per currency (foreign entries shown in their own currency as well as your base), whatever grouping you asked for, and the matching entries themselves. Money in counts positive and money out negative, so the column adds up.

This tab only reads. Nothing on it posts a transaction, edits a balance or changes your books — so there is no wrong question to ask.

Ask replaces the old Review by Payment Mode and Spending query screens: grouping by account answers what Review answered, and does it for any date range.

3. Transactions

Tap + to add: Expense, Income, Card Payment, or Transfer. Amounts can be entered in any currency; the conversion rate is locked at entry time.

• Expense — paid from an account (balance down) or on a card (outstanding up); hits its category.
• Income — pick the source and the account it lands in.
• Card payment — from an account to a card. Paying more than owed → credit balance (see Liabilities).
• Transfer — between accounts, or to a card (same top-up rules as a payment).

Edit any transaction from its list entry — you can even change its Type; the app reverses the old effect and applies the new one exactly. Delete likewise restores balances precisely, including loan disbursements (deleting one removes both the cash and the liability).

4. Automatic capture (Android)

With SMS and Notification access granted, bank messages become transactions:

1. A message arrives → a confirmation card pops up with the parsed amount, card/account, and a category suggestion. Check it, tap Add.
2. Cash-withdrawal messages post as account → Cash transfers.
3. If the app was asleep, captured messages replay the next time you open it — nothing is lost.
4. The same purchase arriving twice (SMS and app notification) is detected and prompted only once.

Teaching new banks. If a message style isn’t recognised, it’s saved under Settings → 5 · SMS automation → Unrecognised messages. Tap Teach, answer three questions (what kind of transaction, which account/card, what keyword identifies the sender) — and that bank auto-detects forever after. You can also paste any message into the Test detection box to try it or teach it directly. Learned rules are listed there and can be deleted any time.

Privacy: only bank-style messages are processed, entirely on your device; nothing is uploaded, and OTP/marketing texts are ignored.

5. Bank statement reconciliation

Consolidation → Bank statement import (CSV, PDF, Excel, or pasted text).

The app extracts the statement’s from–to date range, maps every entry to the month cycle its date belongs to, and matches each against that cycle’s records:

• A header per cycle shows matched vs new counts and the exact difference to consolidate — or “fully consolidated ✓”.
• Tick the new entries and Apply: each is added to its own month sheet (sheets are created if the statement reaches months you don’t have — flagged beforehand).
• A statement closing balance, if present, is applied to the latest covered cycle so the account/card ends exactly on the bank’s figure.
• Card statements ask which account paid the bill, and tell refunds apart from payments.

This means one statement spanning two cycles reconciles both in one pass.

6. Settings tour

Eight numbered sections, plus a Danger zone:

Below the sections: the app version with its update check, and a link to skymatrix.biz.

7. Security

App Lock (Settings → 7 · Security): set a password/PIN once; on the installed Android app you can also unlock with fingerprint or face. When enabled, opening the app and any reset or restore requires confirmation. Forgot the password? Reinstall the app, then restore from your backup — that’s the built-in recovery path, so keep backups current.

8. Backup & cloud sync

• Backup: Settings → 7 · Security → Backup Now. Choose a cloud folder once; afterwards every backup lands there directly, and a centered reminder appears if it’s been more than a day.
• Restore: Settings → 7 · Security → Restore from Backup → pick the file → confirm (password/biometric if locked).
• Cloud sync: paste your Firebase project config into the Cloud sync panel — you can paste the whole snippet exactly as the Firebase console gives it, imports and all. Sign in once per device; changes sync automatically. Force upload pushes your current state everywhere. A blank device can never overwrite your cloud data, and an emptied app silently restores itself from the cloud.

9. Make it yours

Every name in the app is editable and every list is extensible: accounts, credit cards, loans, income sources, expense categories, assets, and currencies. The ✎ pencil renames anything — the new name propagates through every month and every historical transaction in one step. The × removes items safely: anything still referenced by transactions, set as a default, or required by the system politely refuses until you clear the references. Names must be unique across the app; that’s what makes one rename update everything reliably.

10. Good habits

1. Backup before big changes — mass renames, restores, cycle-day changes.
2. Reconcile monthly — import each statement when it arrives; the per-cycle differences make gaps obvious.
3. Teach unrecognised messages promptly — one tap now saves manual entry forever.
4. Force upload after a big session if you use multiple devices.
5. Glance at Consolidation at cycle end — it’s your truth-check against the bank.

Questions or odd behaviour? Email support@skymatrix.biz — we cover permissions, Samsung battery settings and recovery paths.