Your budget, straight from your inbox.

Reference

The setup itself is driven from the Instructions tab of your own copy — that's the single checklist, and it's always in front of you while you work. This page holds the detail each step links out to.

• The permissions screen — what Google asks, and why it names you
• Connecting your institutions — turning on alerts and creating the Gmail filter, bank by bank
• Categories, budgets and Persist — tuning it once transactions arrive
• Help & feedback — ask about a bank, report a problem

The permissions screen — and why it names you

The first time you run Set up / Repair, Google shows this. It looks alarming. Here is what it actually means.

The email address it shows is your own. That is not a mistake. When you made a copy of the sheet, the program inside it became yours — a script in your account, owned by you. Google is telling you that you, as its owner, haven't submitted it for review. You are being asked to approve your own software.

"Verified" is a review Google runs on apps that a company distributes to the public, where the developer is a stranger to you. Budget by Mail isn't distributed that way — every user gets their own copy, so there is no shared app to submit, and this screen will always appear. It's the price of the program living in your account instead of on someone's server.

To continue: click Advanced (shown above as "Hide Advanced" because it's already expanded), then Go to Budget by Mail (unsafe). The word "unsafe" is Google's wording for anything unreviewed — it isn't a judgment about this sheet.

On the next screen you'll see the list of permissions with checkboxes. Tick "Select all" if you're happy with them, then Continue. The program needs all of them together — leave any unticked and it will fail partway through with a confusing error rather than a clear one. Each permission is explained on the Instructions tab of your sheet, and in the privacy policy.

Categories, budgets and Persist

AI categorization works out of the box. New copies use a shared key for a couple of weeks — no account, no API key.

One place for all of it: Budget by Mail → Set up LLM… walks through the trial-or-own-key choice, the provider, your API key and the model, then tests the connection before you finish — so a wrong model tells you immediately instead of half an hour later in a hidden log. It's also how you change a key or model afterwards; re-running it is safe and won't reset anything you didn't change.

Categories & budgets. On the Budgets tab set amounts and periods, and flag payment services (Venmo, PayPal) as Payment Networks so they aren't double-counted. Not Amazon — since July 2026 its order emails no longer list what you bought, so the card charge is the only record of the purchase and needs to count against a budget like any other.

Connecting your institutions (steps 3 & 4)

Two things per institution: (1) make sure it emails you for every transaction — some do by default, some you have to switch on — and (2) add a Gmail filter (Settings → Filters → Create new filter) with From: its sender address that applies the label budget-by-mail/inbox.

Step-by-step for the institutions we've set up (bank menus change — verify in your own account):

More institutions — same pattern (switch on per-transaction alerts, then filter by sender). Senders marked confirm from email couldn't be verified from a public source, so grab the exact address from your first alert email (and tell us via the form below). Menu paths change — verify in your own account.

Don't see your institution? Ask us

If your bank isn't listed above, or you got one working that isn't, tell us on the help & feedback page — send the sender address its alerts come from and we'll add it to this guide for everyone.

That's also the place for anything that isn't working, a transaction that was read wrongly, or a question about getting set up.