A card purchase doesn’t leave your checking account until you pay the bill. Without help, left-to-spend would look bigger than it really is. A card payment bucket fixes that: each purchase sets its amount aside for the bill, so left-to-spend reflects it right away.

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How it works

  1. Switch a card on to give it a payment bucket.
  2. Every purchase on it moves its amount from left-to-spend into that bucket.
  3. When you pay the card from checking, the payment spends the bucket.
The money was already set aside, so paying the card doesn’t lower left-to-spend a second time.

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Switch a card on

Go to Settings › Credit Card Buckets and turn on the switch next to each card. Copper creates a payment bucket named after the card and puts it in the Credit Cards group. Newly linked cards start switched off. You can also do it from the card itself: open it in Settings › Connected Accounts and turn on Set aside this card’s purchases. There you can pick a different payment bucket under Choose payment bucket, or Create payment bucket. Each card has its own bucket; two cards can’t share one.
Purchases are set aside from the moment you switch a card on, not before. To cover what you already owe, tap Cover the rest under the card. It moves the difference between the card’s balance and its bucket from left-to-spend.

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What moves, and when

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The card’s bucket

Card buckets show Set Aside (what’s in the bucket) and Statement Balance (the target). When your card issuer shares statement details through Plaid, the first sync fills in the bucket’s due date and statement target if they’re empty. Tap the card bucket to see the statement balance, minimum payment, payment due date, last payment, credit limit and purchase APR. Card buckets behave like bills elsewhere in Copper: they get bill reminders, count toward heads-up alerts, and can be filled by Fund all. The Credit Cards filter on the Buckets tab lists them together. A few things are fixed for card buckets: they can’t be made private, they don’t take auto-assign rules, and they can’t be created or changed to another type in the bucket editor.

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Switch a card off

Turn off the card’s switch in Settings › Credit Card Buckets. New purchases won’t be set aside. Anything already set aside stays in the bucket until you pay the card or move it.