Get an alert when you're overspending — not when it's already too late
A spreadsheet budget is great on the 1st. By the 15th, you've forgotten it exists. Zufan connects your real bank SMS to a monthly budget—planned vs actual by category—and tells you when you're about to go over while there's still time to adjust.
Your lines, your names—rename Transport to fuel, add rows, then compare planned vs actual from SMS.
Sound familiar?
Stale rules: “30% discretionary” sounded perfect on paper until two weddings hit.
Invisible leakage: frequent small buys never feel like overspending individually.
Manual upkeep: reconciling spreadsheets against SMS defeats people by week three.
Shame spiral: blowing the budget once makes people abandon tracking entirely.
What Zufan does instead
Your template: start from a familiar default or build lines from scratch—rename, reorder, add, or remove rows.
Categories per line: pick which transaction categories count toward each budget row, including custom categories.
Alerts: proactive notifications when total spending or income crosses your plan—not only when you open Excel.
Feeds from lived data: actuals come from categorized SMS and recorded transactions.
Correction loop: copy last month’s plan, tweak categories, and improve next month in minutes.
How it helps in practice
You set 1,500 ETB for eating out. By the 18th, Zufan alerts you at 1,200. You still have 12 days—enough time to pull back instead of crashing your account and starting next month behind. Tap a budget line to see which transactions counted, or fix categories when something landed in the wrong place.
