Take-home pay
The money that arrives after payroll taxes and other deductions the employer already withheld. The budget calculator expects this figure, not gross pay. Using gross pay makes every percent target look easier than the cash you can actually assign.
Subtotal
On the bill split page, the bill before tax and before the tip you are about to add. If a receipt shows a subtotal that already includes a service charge, do not add that charge again as a tip percent.
Tip percent
The share of the pre-tax subtotal you add as a tip. Eighteen percent of $184.60 is $33.228, which this site rounds half up to $33.23. The percent is not applied to the tax line.
Half up
A rounding rule. Look at the next digit. If it is 5 or more, round away from zero. If it is 4 or less, drop it. 10.005 dollars becomes 10.01. 10.004 dollars becomes 10.00. The calculators use this rule when they turn a fraction of a cent into a cent.
Weight
A number you enter in By share mode. It is not a dollar amount. Weights of 1, 1, and 2 mean the third person is responsible for twice the share of each of the others. The dollars come from dividing the total in proportion to the weights.
Custom amount
A dollar figure you type for a person in Custom mode. The tool does not rescale these figures. If they do not add up to the total, the result says how much is short or over.
Needs
In the 50/30/20 check on this site, rent plus food plus transport. The default target is 50 percent of take-home income. Food here means whatever you typed in the Food field, so groceries and restaurants stay separate only if you put restaurants in Other.
Wants
Subscriptions plus Other. The default target is 30 percent of take-home income. A want is a cost you could lower without immediately losing the lease, the lights, or the way you get to work. The label is a sorting choice, not a verdict on whether the purchase was reasonable.
Left over
Income minus the six budget fields. A positive left over is unassigned money. It is not the same as the savings field. A negative left over is a shortfall: the fields you typed already exceed income.
Sinking fund
Money set aside in smaller monthly pieces for a bill that arrives once or a few times a year, such as insurance, a car registration, or a holiday trip. The budget page does not have a separate sinking-fund field. A monthly slice can sit in Savings or in Other if you label it in your own notes.
Emergency fund
Cash you keep for a surprise you cannot move, such as a repair or a gap in pay. A guide on this site treats the first target as one month of essentials, then a larger target you choose. The savings calculator can turn that target into a monthly amount. It does not decide the target for you.
Security deposit
An amount a landlord holds at the start of a lease and may return later if the terms are met. It is not rent, even when it is equal to one month of rent. Counting it as rent will make a moving month and a normal month look the same when they are not.
Progress
Saved amount divided by the goal, shown as a bar. The bar stops at 100 percent even if you have saved more than the goal. The dollar rows still show the full saved amount so the surplus is visible.
30.4375-day month
The average month length used by the savings deadline mode: 365.25 days divided by 12. The day count to your date is divided by that figure and rounded to the nearest whole month, with a minimum of one month when the date is in the future.
Local storage
A small store inside the browser, tied to this site, that keeps the last inputs you typed. It is not an account. Clearing site data removes it. Other websites cannot read it through this page.