Why the first budget tool is a local cash-flow planner

The first boundary

Personal-finance software tends to grow by collecting more: accounts, transactions, bank connections, categories, and predictions. That may be useful in a product built for that responsibility. It is not the right first promise for a small public tool.

The first Bersaglio tool is a monthly cash-flow planner. It asks only for figures a person chooses to enter: net income, housing costs, monthly spending, and an annual-expense total. From those inputs it shows monthly commitments, the amount left after them, the housing share of income, and a monthly provision for annual costs.

Why local matters

The calculation runs in the browser. The tool does not create an account, save inputs, ask for bank access, or send the figures to a server. That is both a privacy choice and a scope choice: the result is a quick view for a conversation with oneself or a household, not a financial profile held by a service.

Keeping the data local also makes the contract legible. There is no hidden data-import step, no delayed synchronization state, and no claim that the tool can see a person’s whole financial picture.

What the tool deliberately does not do

• It does not calculate taxes, entitlements, pension contributions, or mortgage eligibility.
• It does not recommend a loan, an investment, a budget target, or a financial decision.
• It does not use a government or bank API, so it does not depend on a third party’s access policy or availability.
• It does not replace a fuller budgeting system for people who need recurring tracking or historical records.

Those exclusions keep the first version useful without presenting a simplified number as financial advice.

The useful middle

The point is not to reduce a household to one score. It is to make one monthly question easier to answer: after the commitments we can name today, what remains—and have we made room for costs that arrive only once or twice a year?

That is enough for a first public tool. If people find the view useful, later iterations can earn their scope from real use rather than from an assumed need for integrations.