The Interactive Budget Check RCT Shows You Before You've Scanned a Single Receipt
Before you’ve scanned anything, RCT’s onboarding walks you through an interactive budget split between essential categories like groceries and rent-adjacent costs, and discretionary ones like eating out, alcohol, and coffee. You tap categories to cut and watch a savings goal move in real time.
Most apps ask you to set a savings goal before showing you what hitting it would actually cost you. RCT’s onboarding flips that around with a short interactive exercise instead of a static welcome screen.
Essential and discretionary spending, laid out visibly
You’re shown a sample monthly budget broken into segments, groceries, subscriptions, meat and fish, and rent-like essentials on one side, eating out, alcohol, coffee, and snacks on the other. Each segment is sized by how much of the total budget it represents, so the discretionary categories aren’t an abstraction, they’re a visible chunk of the bar.
Tapping a category shows the tradeoff immediately
Tap a discretionary segment and it gets cut from the total, the savings amount updates immediately, and you can see how close that gets you to a target savings goal. It’s a deliberately hands-on way of making a point that’s easy to nod along to in the abstract: hitting a savings target usually means specific categories, not a vague sense of “spending less.”
Why this comes before you’ve scanned anything
The exercise uses a representative sample budget, not your own numbers, since you haven’t scanned a receipt yet at that point in onboarding. The goal isn’t to predict your actual spending, it’s to make the essential-versus-discretionary split concrete before you start using category limits and reports on your own real data.