Sharing & Multiple Budgets

Money is usually a team sport. Afford shares a plan through iCloud — no accounts to create, no server of ours holding your data — and it keeps genuinely separate plans genuinely separate.

Sharing a budget and keeping more than one budget of your own are part of Afford Pro. The free plan includes one budget of your own, and you can always join a budget someone shares with you — it doesn’t count toward that limit.

Sharing a plan

Open Settings and, in the iCloud section, tap Share “your budget” with family… — or, from Settings → Budgets, choose Share with family… on any budget you own. Invite your partner (or anyone with their own Apple Account) through the standard iCloud sharing sheet — Messages, Mail, a link. Starting a share needs Afford Pro; the people you invite don’t need it to join. When they accept:

• Everyone sees the same envelopes, same balances, same transactions, live on their own devices.
• Everyone can allocate, spend and categorize; changes sync to all participants.
• The plan stays in the owner’s iCloud, shared privately with the people invited — Apple’s infrastructure, end to end.

When someone first joins, the whole budget comes down in one go — every account, envelope and transaction — and Afford shows progress while it arrives. Shared budgets are marked with a two-person symbol in the budget list, labeled “Shared with you”, “Shared by name” or “Shared by you”, so two budgets with the same name are easy to tell apart.

Some things deliberately don’t travel with the shared plan:

• Your view preferences — accent color, compact rows, default tab, home section order, your assistant’s name and engine. These follow you across your own devices, but sharing a plan shouldn’t mean sharing a taste in screens.
• Your bank connection. Participants see the accounts and transactions your bank sync brings in, never your SimpleFIN credentials.

To leave a budget someone shared with you, tap Leave “budget” in Settings (or Leave on it in the budget list). The plan stays with its owner; your devices simply stop showing it. The owner can manage or stop sharing from the same place they started it.

Multiple budgets

With Afford Pro you can keep several completely separate budgets — a household plan, a personal one, a small business, a sandbox to experiment in. Each budget has its own envelopes, accounts, transactions, settings and iCloud data; switching between them is instant from Settings → Budgets.

Useful details:

• Bank accounts are chosen per budget. The same SimpleFIN connection feeds all your budgets, but each budget picks which accounts it takes in — your personal card can be in your personal budget and not the shared one. One bank download is shared across budgets, so switching never wastes a sync.
• Sharing is per budget. Share the household plan; keep the others private.
• Names propagate. Rename a budget and every participant sees the new name — and a newer rename is never undone by an older one, even if you renamed a budget that wasn’t open.
• Going back to free keeps everything. If Pro ends, every budget and envelope you made stays; you just can’t add more beyond the free limits.

What syncs, and how

Afford syncs through CloudKit, Apple’s iCloud database service. Turn it on or off with Sync with iCloud in Settings.

• Your budgets live in your private iCloud database, protected by Apple’s iCloud security. We have no access to it — there is no “we” server-side at all.
• A shared budget lives in the owner’s iCloud, shared with participants through CloudKit’s native sharing.
• Sync is designed around real-world messiness: two people categorizing on the plane and the couch at once merge cleanly. If the same item was changed on two devices before either change reached iCloud, Afford doesn’t silently pick one — it shows “changes were made on two devices” and lets you choose which version to keep.
• Settings → iCloud also has Sync now, Download the budget again from iCloud (replaces this device’s copy), and, for the owner, Send everything to iCloud again.

No iCloud? Afford works fully offline on one device — sync and sharing are the only features that need it.