A bucket is money you’ve set aside for one thing: rent, groceries, a trip. Every dollar in a bucket comes out of left-to-spend, so the number you see is always what’s truly free.
Buckets are virtual. Your money stays in your bank accounts, and Copper never moves it. A bucket’s balance is a record of what that money is for.

​
Kinds of bucket

Card buckets are made for you when you switch a card on in Settings › Credit Card Buckets. You can’t create one, or turn another bucket into one, in the bucket editor. See Credit cards.

​
Create a bucket

1

Start a new bucket

On the Buckets tab, tap New bucket at the bottom of the list. With the Bills or Goals filter on, the button reads New bill or New goal.
2

Name it and pick a type

Give it a name, tap the icon to choose a color and an icon, an emoji or a website’s icon (choose Website, paste a link like costco.com and tap Get icon), and choose Bill, Spending or Goal.
3

Set the amounts

Enter what’s in it now and its target. For a bill, choose how often it Repeats (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, yearly or one-time) and its Next Due Date. For a goal, you can add a Target Date (see Goals).
4

Choose where it lives and how it fills

Pick a group under Group Assignment (or Add New Group) and a Funding Schedule to fill it automatically. Then tap Create Bucket.

​
Start from your spending

With no spending buckets yet, the Spending filter offers Find spending buckets from your history. Copper looks at the last 90 days, groups your everyday purchases (groceries, gas, eating out and so on) and suggests a bucket for each with a month’s worth as its target. Untick any you don’t want and tap Add. Where your bank’s category fits, new purchases in it are filed into the bucket automatically. Bills have their own: Find bills from your bank on the Bills filter. On the Goals filter, Build an emergency fund sets up a goal sized to months of your bills and spending. See Emergency fund. In a shared budget you’ll also see Private, which hides the new bucket from everyone else. See Private buckets.

​
Putting money in and taking it out

  • Funding schedules fill buckets toward their targets on the days you choose. See Funding schedules.
  • Fund all, at the top of the Buckets tab, fills several buckets at once from left-to-spend.
  • Fill bucket, on a bill’s sheet, tops that bill up to the amount due.
  • Editing the balance in the bucket editor moves the difference between the bucket and left-to-spend.
  • Penny can move money between buckets or into one from left-to-spend, after you confirm. See Ask Penny.
  • Transactions assigned to a bucket spend from it. If the bucket runs out, it stops at $0 and the rest comes out of left-to-spend. Refunds go back in.
To assign a transaction, open it and choose a bucket under Bucket. To do it automatically, use auto-assign rules. A purchase that’s a few kinds of spending, like a Costco run, can be split between buckets.

​
Bills

Tap a bill to open its sheet: the amount due, the due date, how much is in the bucket, and its status. When a payment lands in a bill’s bucket close to its due date, Copper marks the bill paid and moves the due date to the next cycle. For a monthly bill, a payment up to 20 days early counts. The sheet then shows when it was last paid and how much. The Bills filter on the Buckets tab lists bills by due date, with what your bills cost per month and how much is short over the next 30 days. Find bills from your bank suggests bills from your transactions, including once-a-year ones.

​
Goals

A goal saves toward its Goal Amount. It can be open-ended, filling whenever you fund it, or have a Target Date: “Save $1,200 by March”. To add a date, tap Target Date in the bucket editor and pick a day. Under it, Copper shows what it takes to get there:
  • With a funding schedule, about how much each payday adds and how many paydays are left. Each run funds an even share of what’s still missing, so the goal is full on the last payday before the date. See Funding schedules.
  • Without one, about how much a month gets you there.
If you fall behind, or spend some of it, the paydays left share the rest. Once the date passes, the next run funds whatever’s still missing. To go back to open-ended, tap Make Open-Ended. In the list, a dated goal shows how far along it is and when it’s due, like 40% · by Mar 1.

​
Savings buckets

A savings account can be tracked as a bucket whose balance mirrors the account. Open the account in Settings › Connected Accounts and tap Track as a savings bucket. Its money stays out of left-to-spend and shows with your goals, marked Synced from account. Because the bank sets its balance, it isn’t funded by schedules and can’t have rules.

​
Organizing

Buckets sit in groups, and card buckets go in Credit Cards. A bucket that isn’t in a group is listed under Ungrouped, which keeps its name. Tap any other group’s name to rename it or change its color, collapse a group to tidy the list, or hold and drag groups to reorder them. The filters at the top of the list show All, Bills, Spending, Goals, and Credit Cards once you have a card bucket.

​
Editing and deleting

Tap a spending or goal bucket to edit it; hold any bucket, including a bill, to open the editor. To delete, tap the trash button, then Delete to confirm. Its balance goes back to left-to-spend. For a few seconds after, Undo brings it back as it was. Undo also appears after you fund a bucket or change a transaction’s bucket, category or name. A card bucket can’t be deleted while its card is switched on; switch the card off in Settings › Credit Card Buckets first.