Your Month Can Start on Payday, Not on the 1st
In Settings, under Payday & Month Start, you can pick the day of the month you get paid. RCT then counts your budget month from that day: a period runs from 25 September to 24 October rather than resetting on the 1st, and every screen that quotes a monthly number moves with it. Leave it on the 1st and nothing changes.
Almost no budgeting app asks when your money month starts. It assumes the 1st, because that is when the calendar says a month starts, and the calendar is not paying you.
If you are paid on the 25th, the last week of a calendar month is not the last week of your money. It is the first week of the next paycheck, spent under a heading that says you have nearly run out. Then the 1st arrives, your budget resets to zero spent, and it does so six days after the money actually landed. Every total you read in between answers a question nobody asked: how much have I spent since a date that means nothing to me.
The same days, cut two ways
The top strip is what a budgeting app normally measures you against. The money arrives three quarters of the way through it, so the first 24 days are being paid for out of a paycheck the chart has already forgotten, and the last 6 are the ones you are actually deciding about now.
The bottom strip is the same spending with the boundary moved. It starts on the day you are paid and ends the day before you are paid again.
Picking the day
The setting is one number: the day of the month your money lands. It lives in Settings under Payday & Month Start, and it is picked from a month-shaped grid rather than a scroll wheel, because the thing you are choosing is a day, and a grid is the shape a month already has in your head.
Above the grid the screen leads with the consequence, not the input: the dates the period will actually cover, a tape showing how far into it you are, and the line “Day 9 of 30”. A number like 25 is an abstract answer. 25 September to 24 October is the thing every total in the app will mean afterwards, so it sits at the top and updates as you tap.
You usually do not have to count anything yourself. RCT already works out which day your income tends to land on, from the income entries you have logged, so it can offer that day directly. It is the same calculation behind the payday notification, reused rather than asked for a second time.
A period is a run of days, not 30 days
A period is every day from your payday to the day before the next one. That makes it 28, 29, 30 or 31 days long, depending on the month it starts in, and there are exactly twelve of them a year.
That is deliberate, and it is the part most “custom budget cycle” features get wrong by making it a rolling 30 days. A monthly limit only means something if it is spent against a month. Twelve periods and a 60 euro grocery limit come to 720 euros over the year; a rolling 30-day cycle gives you 12.2 of them, and a limit that quietly costs more than it says. Anything in the app that compares two periods reads their real lengths instead of assuming.
Charts index days the same way. Day 1 of a chart is your payday, not the 1st of the month, so a monthly chart runs 1 to 30 from the day you were paid rather than restarting its numbering in the middle.
What moves with it
Once the boundary moves, it moves everywhere the app says a monthly number out loud:
- Home, both rings: the budget you have spent and how far through the period you are.
- Category limits, including the mini tapes on Home. A grocery limit is spent per period now, so the reset happens when the money arrives.
- The Money tab: the in, out and kept strip, and the pace chart with its projection and its median of your last three periods, all cut on the same boundary.
- Reports, comparison mode, and the month swipe.
- Insights and their notifications, including which window an insight is about.
- The home screen widget, which reads the same setting.
This works because there is only one place in RCT that decides when a month is, and every one of those screens asks it. Before the setting existed, six of them worked it out independently, which was invisible only for as long as the answer was always the 1st. Moving the boundary in one of them would have put two different answers to the same question on screen at once.
What stays on the calendar, on purpose
Four things keep using calendar months, and each is about something other than a monthly total.
The receipt list’s date headers and the consistency calendar are about dates and habits, not budgets: a receipt from 3 October belongs under October, and the streak grid is a wall of weekdays. Recurring expenses stay keyed to the calendar month because those keys are what stop two of your devices from charging the same rent twice. And payday detection itself is, by definition, looking for a day of the month.
What it does to the names of things
While your anchor is the 1st, a period is exactly a calendar month, so the app keeps calling it October. The moment it is not, the app stops using month names and labels the period with its span instead.
That is not a cosmetic choice. A window that is two thirds September should not be titled “October” above a total, because the number underneath would be read as the wrong month’s. So headings become the dates, in every language the app speaks.
Two smaller behaviours worth knowing. If you pick a day after the 28th, months too short to have it start on their last day, so an anchor of the 31st starts February on the 28th; the grid draws those days quieter for exactly that reason. And changing the anchor re-counts your past months too, since RCT cuts history on your current setting rather than storing a history of boundaries. A total you remember seeing may read differently afterwards. The screen says so before you change it.
If you are paid on the 1st
Then nothing about this applies to you, and nothing changed. The default is 1, every existing install kept it, and with an anchor of 1 a period is precisely a calendar month. The setting was built so that the app could move onto payday months without changing a single number for anyone who did not ask for it.
It is one day out of 31, in one screen in Settings. For anyone who has ever looked at a budget that resets a week after their salary lands, it is the setting that makes every other number in the app mean what it says.