How to walk the trail.

The first fifteen minutes.

Ridge is buildless and signs in with Google — no install, no account creation. Your data lives in a single JSON file in your own Google Drive (ridge-data.json) so the app loads it on every device you sign in from.

1. Sign in with Google. Open the app, accept the Drive permission. Ridge only ever reads and writes its own files.
2. Run the first-time tutorial. On a fresh data file the tutorial fires automatically — a four-step walkthrough of the cycle, envelopes, free-to-spend, and surplus. You can replay it any time from Settings → Replay tutorial.
3. Set your pay cycle. Settings → Pay cycle. Pick weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, and the day your pay lands. Every other date in the app — envelope rollovers, planned bill accruals, surplus banking — pivots off this.
4. Create your envelopes. Envelopes tab → New envelope. Start with a small set (Groceries, Fuel, Eating out, an Emergency goal). You can always add more later, and Ridge auto-classifies new transactions to the closest match.
5. Bring your transactions in. Import tab. Drop a CSV from your bank, or hook up a Google Sheet that auto-syncs every sign-in. Built-in profiles cover Frollo, Westpac, CBA, NAB, and Macquarie; new layouts get a one-time column-mapping prompt.
6. Add your assets and debts. Net worth tab. Property, super, cash accounts, credit cards, mortgage, equities. Once the mortgage is in, projection unlocks and starts inferring your true rate from real interest charges.

Where every dollar has a job.

The Envelopes tab is the engine room. Every envelope is one of four types — pick the right type and the rollover, accrual, and goal maths take care of themselves.

The four envelope types

• Spend — regular budget like Groceries or Fuel. Rolls over (or resets) each cycle, your call. Budget can vary cycle-to-cycle and the history is preserved.
• Goal — a target amount by a target date. Italy 2027, new laptop, emergency fund. Per-cycle allocation is auto-calculated; you can override it.
• Planned — irregular bills like rego, insurance, annual subs. You set the amount and due date; Ridge accrues the right slice every cycle so the cash is sitting there when the bill arrives.
• Wealth — money flowing onto your net-worth ledger. Mortgage extra repayments, ETF contributions, super salary-sacrifice. Linked to a specific asset or debt so the same dollar is tracked on both sides.

How to…

1. Create an envelope. Tap + New envelope. Choose a name, an icon (pick from the Ridge glyph picker — categorised by topic), a type, a budget amount, and a colour. Done.
2. Change a budget for one cycle only. Open the envelope, edit the cycle's budget. The previous value is preserved in budgetHistory so historic cycles still show what was true at the time — no retroactive rewriting.
3. Move money between envelopes mid-cycle. Tap ⇄ Transfer allocation at the top. Pick source, destination, amount. This is one-off and only affects the active cycle.
4. Reorder envelopes. Tap ⠿ Reorder. Drag handles appear on each row. The order persists across all tabs that list envelopes (Overview, History, Transactions reclassify modal).
5. Skip or top-up a planned envelope. On a planned envelope, tap the cycle row to mark it skipped or overpaid. Useful when you've front-loaded an annual bill manually.
6. Pause an envelope without deleting. Edit the envelope and uncheck Active for this cycle. It stops accruing but historic spend stays attached.

The path behind you.

Six cycles of envelope spend, surplus, and where the money went, side by side. Use it to spot patterns ("we always overspend Groceries the cycle of a long weekend") and to remember which goals you've actually been feeding.

What you'll see

• 6-cycle heatmap — a grid where each square is a day. Darker = bigger spend, blue = a planned bill day, amber = an over-pace day.
• Envelope trends — small per-envelope charts showing budget vs spend across the last six cycles.
• Surplus, where it went — for each closed cycle: leftover amount, and which goals or wealth envelopes received it.
• Cycle stats — average cycle spend, average surplus, best and worst cycle.

How to…

1. Drill into a single past cycle. Tap any column or summary card. You're taken to that cycle on the Overview tab in read-only mode.
2. Compare cycles for one envelope. In Envelope trends, the per-envelope mini-chart highlights the cycles you went over budget — useful for deciding whether the budget itself is wrong.
3. See where surplus actually went. Each closed cycle shows its surplus and the float transfers attached to it. If you've been banking surplus without deploying it, this is where you'll notice.

The terrain ahead.

Where your net worth is heading, particularly: when your mortgage clears at your current pace, and how much earlier extra repayments would get you there. The rate Ridge projects on isn't a slider you guessed — it's back-calculated from real capitalised-interest charges in your transactions.

What you'll see

• Effective rate — the real rate Ridge inferred from your last N interest charges. Updates as new charges land.
• Clearance date — when the mortgage hits zero at your current pace.
• Years saved vs schedule — how much earlier you'll clear compared to the bank's original amortisation.
• Projection chart — solid line for projected balance, dashed line for the original schedule, "today" marker so you can see how far you've already pulled ahead.
• What-if extra repayment — slider to add $X / cycle on top of your current contribution and watch the clearance date move.
• Rate-change banner — when your inferred rate drifts more than a threshold, you get a calm prompt with an Update rates button.

How to…

1. Trust the rate. Open the mortgage in Transactions and confirm the capitalised-interest rows are tagged. If a few are missing, tag them — Projection re-infers immediately.
2. Test an extra repayment. Drag the Extra per cycle control. The clearance date and "years saved" line update in real time.
3. Apply a detected rate change. When the rate-change banner appears, tap Update rates. The new effective rate is locked in; the old projection is preserved for comparison.

Tune it once. Forget it.

The control room. Most settings are set on day one and never touched again — pay cycle, account types, theme. Others (learned rules, merchant aliases, CSV layouts) accumulate as you use the app, and Settings is where you go when something needs an edit.

What lives here

• Pay cycle — frequency (weekly / fortnightly / monthly) and pay day. The cycle anchor for everything.
• Currency — display only; Ridge never converts.
• Theme — Light (warm paper), Dusk (warm dark), or Auto (follows OS).
• Overview layout — reorder, hide, or show the sections that appear on the home tab.
• Accounts — every account Ridge has seen in your imports. Tag each one as transaction / savings / credit card / mortgage / etc. so account-type rules can auto-classify predictable transactions.
• Learned rules — every "apply to all matching" reclassification you've ever made. Edit, reorder, or delete.
• Merchant aliases — your custom display names. Edit or delete here.
• CSV layouts — built-in and learned import profiles.
• Import method — switch between CSV-only and Google Sheet sync.
• Data — Export JSON (the whole state), Import backup, Replay tutorial, Reset.

How to…

1. Change your pay cycle. Pick the new frequency and day. Existing cycle history is preserved; the change applies from the next cycle forward.
2. Tag account types. For each account, pick its type. Account-type rules then auto-classify (e.g. "spends from credit card → assume Spend envelopes; spends from offset → assume Wealth").
3. Switch to Dusk. Theme → Dusk. Or Auto, in which case Ridge follows your OS dark-mode preference live.
4. Back up your data. Export JSON. The whole state is one file. Drop it into another Drive, version-control it, or import it on another machine.
5. Replay the tutorial. Replay tutorial — the four-step intro fires again. The dismissed-at marker is cleared.
6. Reset everything. Reset wipes ridge-data.json. Confirm twice — there's no undo, only the JSON export you (hopefully) just made.