Credit card spending uses two buckets
When you buy something with a credit card, the purchase remains visible as negative Activity in the spending envelope. ReadyCents also reserves the purchase amount in the card-payment envelope.
Example: Groceries has $300 available and you spend $50 on a credit card. Groceries drops to $250, and the card payment envelope gains $50. That means the money is still in your bank account, but it is now reserved for paying the card.
Ready to Budget automatically funds the gap
If the spending envelope does not have enough Available, ReadyCents uses Ready to Budget for the difference. The envelope keeps the negative Activity for an honest spending history, but the automatically funded portion does not remain negative or appear as another amount to cover.
This is the behavior that matters: Ready to Budget falls once, the card-payment reserve rises once, and the purchase is not counted as an uncovered obligation too.
Credit card payments are transfers
A card payment moves money from a checking or savings account to the credit card account. It lowers the bank account balance and lowers the card balance. It should not count as a new expense because the expense already happened when you made the purchase.
The payment itself is a transfer row, not a normal spending-envelope transaction. ReadyCents derives the linked payment envelope's activity automatically so the budget can show how much reserved cash the payment used.
