Renaming or restructuring reserves

The six default reserves — Survival, Business Ops, Tax, Growth, Lifestyle, Wealth Building — are the priority order. The labels themselves are just labels. If "Business Ops" doesn't match the way you think about your business spend, rename it. If you'd rather call Lifestyle "Quality of Life," do that. The math doesn't care.

What you can't change is the priority order itself. Survival fills before Business Ops, which fills before Tax, and so on. That sequence is core to how the system protects you on lean months. See How the six-tier priority system works if that distinction is fuzzy.

Renaming a reserve

1. Open Settings → Reserves.
2. Click the reserve you want to rename.
3. Edit the Display name field. Up to 32 characters.
4. Click Save. The new name appears across the dashboard, allocation summaries, and exports immediately.

History stays attached. A reserve renamed from "Tax" to "Q-Tax" still has every prior deposit, draw, and allocation event tied to it. Your CSV exports will show the new name on new rows; old rows keep the old name.

Changing the color

Each reserve has a color used in charts, allocation rings, and the runway forecast. Defaults follow the six-tier convention (Survival red, Business Ops orange, Tax yellow, Growth green, Lifestyle blue, Wealth Building purple). Pick from the palette in Settings → Reserves → Color. Custom hex codes aren't supported — the palette is constrained to colors that meet our accessibility contrast targets.

Sub-reserves: splitting a tier

Sometimes one tier holds more than one logical bucket. The most common case is Tax, which often wants to be split into Federal, State, and (for some operators) Local or Self-Employment. Sub-reserves let you do that without breaking priority.

1. Open the parent reserve in Settings.
2. Click Add sub-reserve.
3. Give it a name and a percentage of the parent's allocation (must total 100% across siblings).

When ReservWise allocates to the parent tier, it splits the deposit proportionally across sub-reserves. Each sub-reserve has its own balance, its own floor, and its own surplus behavior. Reporting rolls them up to the parent.

Sub-reserves count against the parent's priority slot. Splitting Tax into three sub-reserves doesn't add three slots to your priority order — it just refines the third slot.

Restructuring without losing history

If you've been running for a while and your six tiers no longer match your business, you have three options:

• Rename in place. Easiest. Keeps all history. Works when the bucket's function hasn't changed.
• Re-purpose with a note. Add an internal note (Settings → Reserves → Notes) explaining the new role. History stays attached but readers of your reports know the meaning shifted.
• Move balance, keep history. If you genuinely need a different bucket, leave the old reserve renamed-and-zeroed and create a new sibling reserve. See Resetting a reserve to zero for the move flow.

What's not currently supported

• Adding a seventh top-level tier. The priority system is exactly six.
• Reordering tiers. The default order is fixed and protects you in lean months.
• Custom hex colors. Choose from the palette.
• Renaming with emoji or special characters in the display name (they're allowed in notes only).

If any of these are blocking you, write us — we want to hear the use case before we change defaults.

What to do next

• Rename one reserve to fit your language. Keep the rest on defaults until you have a reason to change.
• Add sub-reserves for Tax if you owe to multiple jurisdictions. See Taxes & Buckets.
• Re-read How the six-tier priority system works before reordering — you can't, and the reason is intentional.

The names are yours. The order isn't. Customize the labels, leave the logic alone.