Goals overview

Understand account goals, category goals, ETA forecasts, required monthly amounts, and achievements in the goals workspace.

Goals

The Goals row in Plan is the working area for personal financial targets. This includes account-linked goals such as saving toward a balance target and category-linked goals such as keeping spending under control.

Use the Goals and Achievements rows in Plan to switch sections. On a narrow screen, choose them from the section picker. A link to Achievements opens that section directly, while Goals returns to the working list without changing your saved progress.

Personal scope in v1

Account goals, category goals, and achievements are currently individual to your user account. Household-level goals are planned separately, so the current Goals workspace does not share, combine, or assign goal progress across household members.

Goal forecasts

Goal forecasts are lightweight timing estimates for account and legacy goals. The goal card can show whether the saved plan is ahead, on track, needs more, missing a target date, missing contribution data, or already reached. When an ETA is available, it is shown in readable months and years. When a target date is available, the required monthly amount shows the AUD contribution needed to reach that date from the current goal state.

Open the goal details view when you want the compact explainer behind the card. It compares the saved monthly contribution with the target date, current amount, target amount, remaining gap, and any observed trend from available history. These fields are planning signals only; keep your own judgement around timing, priorities, and affordability.

If goal milestone notifications are enabled, Dolla can also send a factual recalibration nudge when a saved goal forecast is meaningfully behind its target date or may need a higher monthly amount. These nudges use the same goal notification setting and are deduped so they do not repeat every time the app checks goals.

Creating goals

Use New goal to create a goal manually. Start with an account goal for a savings target, offset balance, investment account, or debt payoff plan. Use category goals for spending areas you want to monitor month by month.

When three-tier plan limits are available for your account, Free households can edit up to three earliest-created unfinished account goals and three earliest-created category goals. Completed account goals do not count until their balance makes them unfinished again; all category goals count, with no completion state that frees a slot. When a slot is full, new goals of that type are blocked and excess records remain stored as read-only. Completing an editable account goal or deleting an editable goal makes the next oldest excess goal of that type editable; upgrading restores editing for all goals. There is no archive or manual-completion shortcut.

Achievements

Achievements are the personal motivational layer. They help translate consistent habits into visible wins without replacing the main goal-tracking model.

Why goals live separately from budgets

Budgets answer "How am I performing this period?" Goals answer "Am I moving toward a target over time?" They are related, but they solve different planning questions.