A budgeting product asks for visibility into the most sensitive data a business has. The only honest way to ask for that is to state exactly what is read, why each field is needed, what is never touched, and what the product is structurally incapable of doing. All four are below.
BudgetGaga never initiates a transaction or moves funds. It tracks, categorizes and suggests only.
Connections are established read-only through the account aggregation consent your institution provides. Each field below exists because a specific part of the engine cannot function without it.
| Field read | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| Transaction amount | The figure that moves a category against its limit. Without it there is no tracking. |
| Transaction date and posting date | Places the spend in the right cycle and drives velocity and pace calculations. |
| Merchant or payee descriptor | The primary signal for assigning a category, and what merchant rules are written against. |
| Account or card identifier | Distinguishes which instrument the spend came from, which is both a categorization signal and a reporting dimension. |
| Transaction status | Separates settled spend from pending authorizations so committed figures are not double counted. |
| Recurring charge schedule | Lets a known future charge inside the cycle be counted as committed rather than arriving as a surprise. |
Read-only access is not a setting we choose to honour. The connection BudgetGaga holds carries no payment scope, so there is no API call the product could make to move money even if something went badly wrong inside it. The same applies to approvals: there is no code path that marks a reallocation approved without an authenticated user action behind it.
Policies can be changed. Missing capabilities cannot be exercised. We would rather the guarantee rest on the second.
You are not trading access to your spend data for the use of a product. It remains your data, it leaves whenever you ask, and it is not a resource we monetise elsewhere.
Categories, limits, limit history, every categorized transaction with its assigned category and confidence, every flag, and every approval decision. Structured formats that open in a spreadsheet, not a proprietary dump.
Your transaction data is not made available to third parties for their own purposes, and it is not packaged into data products. The subscription is the business model.
Revoking an account connection stops data retrieval at once. Already retrieved transactions remain in your own ledger so historical reports do not break, and you can delete that history outright if you prefer.
Your data stays exportable for ninety days after a subscription ends, so leaving never means racing a deadline to retrieve your own figures.
Written to be understood by the person signing up rather than to satisfy a compliance checklist.
Every connection to BudgetGaga runs over current TLS. Stored transaction and budget data is encrypted at rest, and connection tokens are held in a dedicated secret store rather than alongside application data.
In your account, budget owners see their own categories and finance roles see everything. On our side, access to customer data is restricted to the engineers who need it to operate the service, granted individually and logged when exercised.
Logins, connection changes, categorization overrides, rule edits and every approval or decline are recorded with actor and timestamp. Records are appended, never edited, so an audit trail cannot be tidied up after the fact.
Every query is scoped to your account at the data layer rather than filtered in the interface, so one customer's categories and transactions are not reachable from another's session.
Budget and transaction data is backed up on a regular schedule with encrypted, access-controlled copies, and restores are tested rather than assumed to work.
If an incident affects your data we will tell you what happened, what was affected and what we did, without waiting for you to notice or ask. A security report can be sent to us from the contact page and will be answered by a person.
It tracks, categorizes and suggests. Approving a reallocation changes a budget limit inside BudgetGaga and nothing in your bank. Every suggestion the engine raises waits for a named person to decide on it.
One of them still lets you do something about it.
The category closed at 112 percent. The money left the account three weeks ago. The only decision available now is which line to explain it against.
At 74 percent on day 11 the category is flagged as trending over, with an under-spent line named as the source. You approve the shift, or you tighten the spend. Either way you chose.