Know where your household money goes each month

About Rureza

A budgeting app built around how households actually handle money

Rureza started in Bristol in 2013, in a rented room on Stokes Croft with two desks and one shared spreadsheet. The founders had spent years watching friends and relatives try to keep track of family money using a notebook, a bank statement and a good deal of guesswork. One partner paid the mortgage, the other covered food and school costs, and nobody could say with confidence where the rest had gone at the end of the month.

The first version of the app did very little. It let two adults record an income or an expense, give it a category and see a monthly total. That was enough to show us what households needed: a shared view that both partners could trust, without a finance degree to read it.

How the company grew

Growth was slow and mostly came from recommendations. Over 13 years the team has grown from two people to 13, and we have worked with 845 families, which is roughly 65 new households each year. Across all of them we have completed 1,184 jobs, whether that meant setting up a household budget, adjusting categories after a change of circumstances or helping someone move their records from another tool. Of everyone we have helped, 328 clients came back for a second job, usually after a new baby, a house move or a change of work.

We now offer 12 services around the app and work with households across 7 areas in and around Bristol. We reply to most requests within about an hour during opening hours, because a question about money tends to be urgent for the person asking it.

Mission and vision

Our mission is simple to state. We want every household to be able to see what comes in, what goes out and what is left, without needing to ask anyone for help. A family should be able to open the app on a bus, add a purchase in under ten seconds and move on with their day.

Our vision is a calmer relationship with money. We do not promise that an app will make anyone richer. We do think that a clear record removes a lot of arguments, and that people make steadier choices when the numbers are in front of them rather than in their heads.

Values we work by

The first value is plain speaking. Categories are named the way people say them, such as groceries, childcare, fuel and utilities, not in accounting terms. The second is privacy. Your records belong to your household, we do not sell them, and we explain in ordinary language what is stored and why. The third is honesty about limits. Rureza is a tracking tool. It does not give investment advice, and we tell clients so at the start.

The fourth value is patience. Many people come to us after months of avoiding their bank statements, and some feel embarrassed. We start from wherever they are, and nobody is asked to justify a past purchase.

Experience and expertise

Thirteen years of daily use have taught us which features matter. Shared accounts for couples, separate pots for children's costs, recurring bills with reminders and a monthly summary that fits on one screen are all things clients asked for repeatedly. Features that looked impressive but went unused were removed. We test every release on real devices, from recent phones to older models still in use in many homes, and we keep a log of every change so that clients can see what is different after an update.

Our staff come from software development, customer support and household finance advice. They keep up with changes to UK benefits, tax-year dates and common bill cycles, so that the default categories and reminders match how households in Britain really pay for things.

The people you will deal with

These are four of the 13 people at Rureza, with a short note on what each one does day to day.