Buckets

Buckets is a boutique software house that focuses on one thing only: helping people regain control of personal finances without surrendering their data. The company’s sole release, Buckets, is a desktop budgeting engine built for users who want the speed of a spreadsheet combined with the discipline of an envelope system and the reassurance of total privacy. Installation creates a local, encrypted ledger that never phones home; transactions can be imported from virtually any bank that offers OFX, QFX or CSV exports, then automatically categorized through user-trained rules. The interface revolves around a drag-and-drop bucket board where dollars are visually assigned to upcoming expenses, sinking funds, or debt-payoff targets; shortfall warnings appear the moment outflow threatens to exceed inflow. Couples can sync a single ledger across household machines without cloud servers by sharing an optional passphrase, while lone users can run the program portably from a USB stick. Advanced features include scheduled transactions, overspill borrowing between envelopes, net-worth graphs, and a “what-if” sandbox for modeling future purchases or job changes. Because the entire dataset lives on the user’s hardware, budgets open instantly, backups are simple file copies, and there are no subscription tiers or feature gates. Buckets is offered for free on get.nero.com, where the latest Windows build is delivered through trusted package sources such as winget, supports batch installation alongside other applications, and updates itself automatically whenever a new release is published.