The Kids screen

A screen you can hand to a child. It shows them what they have, what's coming, what they're saving for, and how many weeks until they can buy it. Nothing else — no accounts, no transactions, no budget.

Find it in the top nav. On a phone, tap ⋯ More, then Kids. A tablet held sideways is what it's built for.

There is no child account

No login, no email, no password. A child never signs in to anything.

The only thing stored about a child is a first name you type. No birthdate, no last name, no photo. Ask what we know about your kid and the answer is: what you'd call them at dinner.

The allowance is real money

Set an allowance and it doesn't create a pretend ledger. It creates an actual transaction, out of an envelope you pick, on the schedule you set. Give $10 a week and $10 a week genuinely leaves that envelope.

That's the point. The family's books and the child's books are the same money — so the allowance is budgeted for like everything else, instead of found in a wallet on Saturday.

Watch the arithmetic, because most of us get it wrong: $10 a week is about $43 a month, not $40. There are more than four weeks in most months. The app shows you the monthly figure while you're setting it up, for exactly that reason.

If a device sits unused for a while, nothing is lost — the next payment catches up what's owed, up to eight periods back.

Saving up

A child picks something they want and the screen does the waiting math: what they have, what's coming, how many weeks until it's theirs. That countdown is the whole lesson, and it teaches itself.

The screen is written for a child — short words, warm, no budgeting talk. It's their screen, not a small copy of yours.

There are a couple of achievements over there too, theirs to earn.

Handing over the device

Hand over this device on a kid's card starts kid mode. The device then shows only that child's screen until someone enters the PIN — Grown-ups, then four digits, and you're back.

Kid mode is per device. Putting the tablet into kid mode doesn't touch your phone.

A short notice appears every single time you start it, and you have to accept it. Here's what it says, and we mean it plainly:

Kid mode is a child lock, not a security system. The device stays signed in to your account. Kid mode hides your household's finances from view, and the PIN stops a kid wandering out of it — but someone determined could get around it. It's a screen you can hand to a nine-year-old, not a vault. Treat the device the way you'd treat your unlocked phone.

The kid button

Off until you turn it on. The switch is called Let kids see some household costs, and it adds a small kid button to each transaction.

Mark one and your child sees what it was and what it cost — groceries, the power bill, the vet. Money stops being a thing that happens invisibly to adults.

• One item at a time, each with a confirmation. Nothing is shared in bulk.
• Children see only what you picked. Never the account, never the balance, never the rest of the list.
• Turn the switch back off and everything already shared disappears with it.

→ the kid button on a transaction

Archiving a kid

Kids grow up. Archiving one takes them off the page and stops the allowance — and every payment already made stays in your household's books, where it belongs. Nothing is rewritten backward. Last year's spending happened.