What is drift narration?
Drift is the gap between what your plan called for and what’s actually happening. Narration is Holdfast describing that gap in plain English — no instructions, no judgment.
What “drift” means
When you commit a budget, you set planned numbers for every category: $250 for Groceries, $180 for Dining, and so on. As transactions land through the month, your actual spending starts to diverge from those plans. That divergence is drift.
For each category, Holdfast tracks three things:
- Planned. What you set when you committed.
- Actual.What’s posted so far this month.
- Drift. Actual minus planned (a positive number means over).
A real example, mid-month
“Over” vs. “pacing over”
These chips look similar but mean different things:
- Overmeans you’ve already spent more than the plan called for. Past tense.
- Pacing overmeans you’re on track to end the month over the plan, even though you haven’t yet. Forward-looking.
Pacing is computed by extrapolating your current rate of spending to the end of the month. If you’re ten days in and have spent half your Dining budget, you’re pacing over. The chip appears before you actually go over — like a weather forecast.
The narration
Once a day, Holdfast asks Claude (the AI model we use) to summarize what’s notable about the month so far. We send the model a structured summary of plan vs. actual, never your raw transactions or merchant names. The response is two to three sentences in plain English.
Sample narration
Groceries are over by $62 with eleven days left. Dining is well under. Car insurance was covered by the sinking fund this period. Unallocated is positive by $45.
Important
The narration describes what’s happening. It does not tell you what to do about it. That’s a deliberate constraint — Holdfast is not a financial advisor, and the AI is system-prompted to never prescribe.
What the Unallocated line means
Unallocated is everything in your plan that wasn’t earmarked for a specific category. When you committed, it was the number that made the plan balance — income minus fixed minus variable minus goal contributions.
As the month runs, Unallocated drift tracks the gap between what you planned to keep unallocated and what actually stayed unallocated.
- Positive Unallocated drift = the month is saving more than the plan called for. You spent less than planned somewhere.
- Negative Unallocated drift = the month outspent its plan. Something is over.
The Unallocated line is the single fastest gut-check on whether the month is going well — one number, easy to read.
When narration fires
Drift narration is a Plus feature. It runs:
- The first time you open the dashboard after a committed budget.
- Once a day for the rest of the month (we cache the result so the AI doesn’t fire on every page load).
- When you manually tap the “refresh” affordance on the narration card.
At the end of the period, the running narration is archived into the month’s recap. The next month’s narration starts fresh against the new plan — see the monthly ritual for how the recurring loop hands off between periods.