Your first week

Start with the guided setup

The first screen you meet has two halves: an assistant asking how you spend, and your account taking shape beside it. As you answer, the assistant proposes a currency, a set of categories, budgets to group them into, the sources your income comes from, the wallets your money sits in, and any trip worth tracking on its own.

Everything the assistant proposes lands on that screen as a draft you can open and edit. Rename anything. Delete anything. Add what it missed by hand. Nothing exists in your account until you press Create my account, and then all of it is created at once.

Invitations that were waiting for you are settled here too. Accepting a shared budget joins you to it, accepts the connection to whoever sent it, and offers that budget's categories as a starting point for your own.

If you would rather not start with a conversation, the header links to a step-by-step wizard instead, and the currency, categories, budgets and wallets already proposed carry over into it.

Import one month

Next, export one month of transactions from your bank as CSV or PDF and import it. One month is enough to show whether the categories from the guided setup match how you actually spend, and small enough that correcting the misses is not a chore.

Every import belongs to a wallet, which you pick before uploading. That is how each row knows which balance it will move once published. A large file takes a while. The review page updates itself as rows come in.

Correct what the import got wrong

Corrections happen while the rows are still drafts, before anything is published. Open a draft to change its category, budget, wallet, amount, date or comment. Delete the rows you did not want. Where a row is flagged as a possible duplicate, merge it into the transaction you already have rather than publishing a second copy.

When a batch looks right, publish rows one at a time, or select several and publish them together. Publishing is the step that moves your wallet balances and puts the rows into your transaction list.

Bring in the other person

Once your own data looks right, invite the other person by email. You can do it from the People page, or straight from the budget or event you want to share. Inviting somebody you are not connected to yet sends the connection request and queues the share behind it in one action, so you do not have to connect first and share second.

They accept from their own account, and accepting the budget accepts the connection with it. If they have no account yet, the invitation waits for them to sign up and is waiting on their setup screen when they do. Turning the connection down drops whatever was queued behind it.

Once they are in, the budget's total for the current month covers everyone in it, and each of you can still see your own share on its own.

Look at the month

By the end of the week you have a full month in. Open Stats and pick that month. The overview gives you income, expenses and what is left, plus where the money came from and where it went. Separate tabs break the same month down by budget and by category.

Everything on those pages is derived from your transactions, so anything that looks wrong there is fixed by correcting the transaction behind it.