Questions about BalanceWright
Every question we get asked, answered in one place and in full: what BalanceWright costs, whether it touches your bank, what happens to your records if the phone goes in the lake, and what this app deliberately will not do.
All 17 answers are on this page, in the open. Nothing is folded away behind a button you have to press first, so you can search the page with your browser’s Find, or print the lot and read it away from the screen.
Money
What it costs, what happens if you never pay, and where the price goes from here.
What does it cost?
The app is a free download and everything works from the first day — entries, reconciling, search, recurring bills, transfers, export and backup. It asks for the one-time $9.99 after you balance your first statement, or after 100 entries, whichever comes first. One payment. No subscription, no premium tier, and free updates. There are no ads, before you pay or after, because there is no ad code in the app at all.
What happens if I decide not to pay?
If you decide not to pay, nothing is taken away. The register stays readable, searchable, printable and backed up. You just cannot write new entries until you unlock it. Your records are yours whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Will the price change later, or turn into a subscription?
What you buy is a one-time unlock, and updates to it are free. If we ever sell an optional extra, what you already bought stays yours. We are not going to convert this into a subscription — that is the thing most of our users are leaving behind.
How do I get a refund?
The money goes to the store you bought it from, so that is where a refund starts rather than with us. On an iPhone that is Apple: use Report a Problem on your receipt, or go to reportaproblem.apple.com and pick the purchase out of the list. On an Android phone it is Google Play: open your order history at play.google.com/store/account/orderhistory and ask for a refund on the order. Apple decides its own refunds, and on an iPhone we have no way to send the money back ourselves. Google Play answers the early requests itself and passes the later ones to us, and those we can refund from our side. So if the store turns you away or the form will not take it, write to support@balancewright.com: on an iPhone we will help you chase it, and on an Android phone we can put it through.
Your records
Where your entries live, what reaches us, and what survives a lost phone.
Does BalanceWright connect to my bank?
It works with no internet connection. There is no bank login, so there is no password of yours to lose and no sync to break. You write down what you spend, the way you always have, and you reconcile it against the paper statement your bank sends you.
What happens to my records if I lose my phone?
Your register lives on your own phone, and the app keeps rotating copies of it by itself. Where the copies go beyond the phone itself is where the two phones differ, so here is each. On iPhone, if you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on, every copy is also written to the app’s own iCloud Drive folder, by itself. If you are not, the Backup screen tells you so rather than claiming a copy it did not make. On Android, the register is included in the phone’s own backup, and you can pick a folder for the app to write its copies into — one that syncs to Google Drive if you want it to. You can also save a copy anywhere you like and restore from it — your own folder, a file you emailed to yourself, or iCloud Drive on an iPhone. iCloud Drive in that list is the iPhone one; on an Android phone it is the folder you picked, or whichever file app you keep things in. On the replacement phone you install BalanceWright, open Backup & restore, and pick the copy you want back.
Could an update erase my entries, the way my last app did?
That is the failure this app was built around. Once you lock a reconciled statement it is settled, and updates do not rewrite it. The app keeps rotating copies of your register by itself, and you can save your own copy anywhere you like at any time. You are never holding only one copy that only we control.
What do you collect about me?
Your transactions never leave your device except to a backup you choose. We never receive them. Sentry: Crash reports — device model and what the app was doing when it stopped. PostHog: Anonymous counts, such as "a statement was reconciled". There is an off switch in Settings. RevenueCat: Records the one-time purchase so it can be restored on a new phone. There is no account to make and the app asks for no permissions at all.
The app
What it does, what it refuses to do, and whether you can read it.
Is the type big enough to read?
The type is large and high-contrast, and the app follows the text size you set on your phone, all the way up. That holds on an iPhone and on an Android phone alike, and every screen is checked at the largest sizes rather than only at the default one.
Do recurring bills get entered for me?
Pension, rent, insurance, tithe: set them down once and they appear on the day they are due, marked scheduled. They move only your projected balance until you post them. Nothing is ever posted behind your back.
Can I bring my history over from another app?
Bring your history over from another app with a CSV file, matching up the columns as you go. Bringing a history across does not use up any of your free entries, so you keep those for your own writing.
Can I search and print my register?
Search a register by payee, memo, amount or check number, across every year you have kept, and filter by date, category or status. Any register exports to a CSV file or a printable PDF, whenever you want, and that keeps working whether or not you have paid.
Is this a budgeting app?
No, and that is deliberate. It is not a budgeting app, a net-worth tracker or an AI assistant. There are no budgets to set up, nothing is filed for you, and there is no advice. Categories are there if you want them, presets or your own, and nothing is ever categorised for you. You can print totals by category for a month, three months or a year.
Getting it
When it arrives, which phones and which stores, what it will not fit, and who is behind it.
When can I get BalanceWright?
BalanceWright is going through store review, so it is not on sale yet. It comes to the App Store and Google Play together, not to one of them and then the other months later. There is a box at the foot of every page on this site where you can leave an email address. We email you once, on the day BalanceWright goes on sale, and then we delete your address. No newsletter, no second email, nothing passed to anyone else. If you would rather not leave an address at all, write to support@balancewright.com instead, or just come back and look.
Is the Android version the same app?
Yes. One set of code builds both, so writing entries, reconciling, search, recurring bills, transfers, categories, import and export are the same on iPhone and Android, and so is the $9.99 one-time unlock. Two differences do matter, and neither of them is in the register itself. The first is where the app writes its own copies of your register, which is set out under Your records above. The second matters before you buy: the two stores keep separate records of what you own, so buying the unlock on one of them does not unlock it on the other. If you move from an iPhone to an Android phone later, your register travels in a backup file, but the unlock is bought again on the new store.
Will it work on my iPad or on an Android tablet?
It is built for phones. It is not designed or tested for tablets. An iPad will run it the way it runs any iPhone app, in a phone-sized window, and an Android tablet will install it and run it on the bigger screen. Nothing is missing and nothing is at risk — it is the same register, and the same copies of it — but every screen is drawn for a phone held in one hand, so we would not sell it to you as a tablet app. It is one payment, so if that changes later there is nothing further to buy.
Who is behind this?
BalanceWright is an independent app studio. BalanceWright is an independent app. It is not affiliated with Apple, with Google, or with any other checkbook or finance app. It does not connect to your bank and it does not give financial advice. Support is read by the person who built the app, at support@balancewright.com.
Your question is not here
Then ask it. Write to support@balancewright.com and it reaches the person who built the app, not a ticket queue and not a robot. You do not need an account to ask, and you do not have to have bought anything. If it turns out to be a question other people are asking too, it gets added to this page.
None of this has to be taken on trust
Free to try. $9.99 once to keep writing. Which means every answer above is one you can put to the test on your own statement, with your own figures, before any money changes hands. That is the order this was built in, on purpose.