About
Calm tools for running a household.
Recurna builds calm tools for running a household. Flow runs the money: see your balance weeks ahead and test decisions before you make them. Your data stays yours, built in Canada.
Why I built this
I've kept my own money on a weekly ledger for years.
For a long time a monthly budget worked for me. Most of my bills were monthly, my income arrived twice a month, and I had deliberately kept things that way.
Then I moved to a larger city for a job, became my family's sole income earner, and switched both the mortgage and the vehicle payment to biweekly. The mortgage was accelerated biweekly, a good long-term decision, but one that changed the rhythm of our cash flow. In some months two three-payment bills arrived together, and the plan suddenly felt like it was coming apart.
My mom is a bookkeeper, and she helped me see the problem differently: not in months, but in weeks. We built some wild spreadsheets and mapped out how money actually moved. Once I could see those double three-payment months far ahead of time, I could set money aside gradually instead of being blindsided by them.
The weekly model is right. Monthly budgets hide the weeks bills land together. You can be on budget for the month and still come up short on a Tuesday. Once I started thinking in weeks, I couldn't go back.
So I built the one I wanted
The tool I used got the job done, but it was dry and slow to work with. Simple things took more steps than I wanted to spend on them. It could record a plan, but it could only take me so far once I wanted to ask bigger questions about the future.
I'm a software engineer, and UX and accessibility are the part I care most about. So I started building the one I wanted: calm to look at, quick to work with, and clear about what the numbers are actually saying.
Charts that answer a question instead of decorating one. A way to test a change (a raise, a move, a second car) without mangling the real plan I spent months getting right. And a way to check, honestly, how close my forecast came to what actually happened.
A budget is blameless
It isn't there to make you feel bad, and it doesn't work if you lie to it. Being honest about what you spend is the only thing that keeps the picture true. So nothing here scolds you. You're an adult with a plan and a rough week.
A lot of the money stress I've felt, and watched other people carry, was not only a money problem. It was an information problem. You don't know whether March is fine, so you assume it isn't. Then you look. Sometimes the answer is that you are fine, and sometimes it is that you have a month to do something about it. Either one is steadier ground than not knowing.
That is the whole product: look, and know.
Your numbers, not you
My job is to keep the thinnest possible link between you and the money you tell me about.
Your name and email stay with our identity provider. The account record on our side is an internal id and nothing else, so the database holding your forecast holds no identity at all: just the numbers you typed and the labels you wrote. There is no bank connection to grant, no read access, and nothing about your money gathered in the background.
Two exceptions, worth naming rather than burying: applying for the beta, and inviting someone to share your forecast, both ask for an email, because something has to be sent. Those sit on their own, apart from any forecast.
It takes more work to build it this way. The trade is worth it.
The specifics are in Security & data and the Privacy Policy.
Where this comes from
My parents were self-employed for most of my childhood, so money at our house was seasonal and talked about openly. I learned to save, invest, and plan early. I know now what a head start that was.
Most people are never taught this, and in Canada the gap is wide. That is why the guides and calculators are free and ungated, and why Flow is priced the way it is. Good financial decisions should come with a clear view of what they ask of your cash flow.
If this helps someone see that they mostly need a realistic plan and permission to stop worrying, that is a contribution I am happy to have made.
Mat Dupont Founder, Recurna
Recurna Flow ยท invite-only beta
See your year. Test the future before you live it.
Apply for the betaFounding members get Pro free for a year, then $6/mo locked for two more. Applications reviewed weekly.