Frequently Asked Questions & Quick How-To's

You can verify notification delivery directly within the app without needing to CC yourself:

• Live Status: Look at the co-owner's balance card on the Shared Expenses tab to see their "Last notified" status (e.g., "Notified today at 2:15 PM").
• Instant Toast: If you manually send a notice using the Bell icon, an instant confirmation toast will appear with their email and timestamp.
• Audit Details: Open the co-owner detail modal to view the Notification Delivery & Audit card for complete scheduling and delivery history.
• Email Receipts: If you prefer to receive email confirmations, you can edit the co-owner in Setup and change your Owner Email Confirmation setting to Lightweight Delivery Receipt or Full CC Copy.

To log a transaction, go to the Transactions page and click New Transaction. Choose either Expense, Income, or Transfer, enter the amount, select the financial account, assign a category, and optionally upload a receipt. Once saved:

• Income increases asset account balances and decreases liability account balances.
• Expenses decrease asset account balances and increase liability account balances.
• Transfers atomically deduct funds from the source account and deposit them in the destination account.

You can create automated categorization rules to save time when importing bank statements or logging transactions:

1. Go to Settings and find the Transaction Rules section (or edit from the Transactions screen).
2. Click Create Rule.
3. Enter a keyword match string (e.g. Starbucks) and select a category (e.g. Food & Dining) and tags to apply automatically.
4. Toggle the rule to Active. Future manual entries, CSV uploads, or Plaid syncs matching the keyword will categorize themselves automatically.

A rule can also tick "Treat matching deposits as refunds". When set, any incoming (money-in) transaction the rule matches is recorded as a refund — an expense with a positive amount — instead of income, so it credits its category back rather than inflating your income. This is the hands-off fix for a recurring credit the automatic detector doesn't recognize by wording alone, such as a monthly "Walmart+ Credit" that offsets its subscription charge. It only ever affects money coming in; matching charges are left untouched.

If you own rental properties, a rule can also handle the Properties Inbox for you. Tick Mark personal (e.g. on a rule matching Trader Joe's) and matching charges skip the inbox automatically, the same as clicking "Mark personal" there by hand. Or link the rule to a property and Schedule E category (e.g. HomeDepot on AMEX → 21 Crosby / Repairs) and tick File automatically at sync to have it file itself instead of just suggesting itself in the inbox — this one is off by default on every rule, since it decides what lands on a tax form.

A rule can also split a charge that is part property and part personal — a power bill covering the duplex and your own half of the house — and point each part at its own destination. Each part then appears in the Properties Inbox as its own line, so the property share is filed to Schedule E and the personal share is dismissed independently. The same File automatically at sync tick applies per part, and re-running the rule never overwrites a part you have already filed by hand.

A charge only becomes a shared expense once it has been filed to a property. That is the moment the app looks up who co-owns the property, at what percentage, and writes each partner’s share. Matching a rule is not enough on its own — and neither is having the right property named on the rule.

Where the charge is waiting depends on one tick. On a rule linked to a property, File automatically at sync decides whether the rule acts or only advises:

• Ticked — the charge is filed the moment it arrives from your bank, and each co-owner’s share appears on the Shared Expenses tab without you doing anything.
• Not ticked (the default) — the charge lands in Properties → Inbox with the rule’s answer already filled in as a suggestion. Accept it and it is filed, and the shares appear then. Until you do, nothing reaches the ledger.

Neither setting is wrong. Leaving it off is the safer default because filing a charge decides what lands on a tax form; ticking it is for the recurring bills you are certain about, like a monthly utility on a duplex. On a rule that splits a charge into a property part and a personal part, the tick applies to each part separately.

So if a shared expense is missing, check the Inbox first — it is almost always sitting there waiting to be accepted, rather than lost.

The Inbox lists charges that have no property on them yet, for one year at a time. Four things take a charge off it, and only the last is a problem:

• It is already filed to a property. Filed charges leave the Inbox and appear on the property’s P&L and, if you have partners, the Shared Expenses tab. A rule with File automatically at sync ticked files charges the moment they arrive, so they may never pass through the Inbox at all.
• It was marked personal — by you, or by a rule with Mark personal on it. That is permanent for that charge, and nothing else about the transaction changes.
• It is in a different year. The year selector at the top of the Properties page scopes this list. A December bill that posted in January is under the other year.
• It is not an expense. Income and transfers never appear here. If a bill was recorded as a transfer — some bank feeds label utility payments that way — it will not show up, and it will not be split with co-owners either. Change the transaction’s type and it will.

To find a specific charge, use the search box at the top of the Inbox: type the payee (e.g. Water Department) and it searches the whole year, not just the rows on screen. Select all then applies to your search results, so a year of one recurring bill can be filed in a couple of clicks.

Open the month it should belong to, choose Find a deposit, and pick it from the list. If it is currently sitting on the wrong month, unlink it there first — open that month and click the unlink icon beside the deposit — and it becomes available again straight away.

The list shows every deposit not already tied to a month, nearest that month’s due date first, and labels each one with how early or late it arrived. If the payment came in a long way outside the month, search for it by description or amount and the list reaches deposits from any date.

Why it happened. Each month claims deposits within a window around its due date. That window used to close about three weeks after the rent was due, so rent paid at the very end of the month fell outside its own month and inside the next one — and the automatic match read it as an early payment rather than a late one. The window now runs to roughly six weeks, and where two months could both claim a deposit the older unpaid month wins, so late rent lands where it belongs. If a tenant skips a month entirely, the next payment will pay down that older month first — the same way a rent balance normally works — and you can move it with Find a deposit if you would rather account for it differently.

On the Transactions page, you can use the per-row checkboxes or the select-all checkbox in the header to select multiple transactions and perform bulk actions like deleting, assigning to a rental property, changing categories, or adding/removing tags.

Bank-Synced Rows: Synced transactions (from Plaid or SimpleFIN) are automatically protected. If you perform a bulk delete, the system will skip synced transactions rather than delete them, matching the existing single-delete rule. The action result will report how many rows were updated and how many were protected.

If you enable Rollover on a budget category, any leftover or overspent funds from the previous month carry over as a positive or negative adjustment to the current month's budget:

Adjusted Budget = Current Month Budget + Previous Month Rollover Balance

For example, if you budget $100 for Food and spend $80, $20 is added to your next month's budget limit, giving you $120 to spend. If you spend $110, the overage (-$10) is subtracted from the next month, leaving you with $90. The system uses batch lookbacks to calculate this in real-time without N+1 query lag.

No, you should not set a budget for transfers or credit card payments.

When you make purchases with a credit card (such as groceries, gas, or dining), those expenses are already categorized and deducted from your monthly budget under their respective spending categories (e.g. Food & Dining, Transportation). When you later pay your credit card bill or transfer money between accounts, you are simply moving funds between accounts you already own — it is an internal transfer, not a new expense.

If you created a budget for transfers, every credit card purchase would be counted twice in your spending totals. Transfers are automatically excluded from monthly spending calculations and from the Budget > Total Spent card. To track credit card balances, minimum payments, and payoff schedules, use the Debt Payoff Planner (/debt).

Use Planned Expenses, in its own section on the Budgets page. Give it a target amount and a due date, and it figures out how much to set aside each month so the full amount is ready in time — instead of that bill landing all at once and blowing up a single month's budget.

Should I also set a category budget for this bill? No — keep the category (e.g. Taxes or Insurance) in your categories list for transaction tagging, but leave the monthly budget amount at $0.00 / blank. The Planned Expense automatically adds your required monthly set-aside to Total Budgeted and the Reserved metric. Setting a separate category budget on top of it would double-budget the amount.

The monthly amount isn't fixed: it's recalculated every month from whatever is left to save divided by the months remaining. Miss a month, and next month's amount goes up to compensate. Add extra, and it comes back down. You never have to redo the math yourself.

When the bill arrives, record the payment against the Planned Expense and match it to the transaction. It's paid from what you've saved rather than that category's monthly budget — and if you hadn't quite saved enough, only the uncovered part shows up against your budget, so you can always see exactly where you stand.

No — the two are answering different questions on purpose.

The Expenses card shows what your ordinary month cost. Anything paid out of a Planned Expense is listed separately just beneath it, as “+$1,800.00 planned draws”. Add the two together and you have the figure your bank shows. The card also reports that combined total when you click into it.

This is the whole point of saving ahead. If a $1,800 property tax bill you'd been funding for six months landed in your Expenses card as ordinary spending, December would look like a disaster in a year where you did everything right.

If you need the raw bank figure — for taxes, or to hand to someone else — use the CSV export from Reports. Amounts in that file are exactly as your bank recorded them, never adjusted, with two extra columns showing which rows a fund paid for and how much.

Your savings rate is measured against what each month actually cost — your ordinary spending plus the amount you set aside for Planned Expenses that month. It is not based on which large bills happened to be paid.

The practical effect is that the figure stops lurching. A month where a big planned bill arrives doesn't crater it, and a quiet month doesn't flatter it. Each month is charged the steady amount it genuinely committed to.

Previously the set-aside wasn't counted at all, so money looked saved when it went into a fund and never looked spent when it came back out — which made the rate climb over time whether or not anything had improved. If your figure moved, this is why, and the new number is the more honest one. If you have no Planned Expenses set up, nothing changes.

The portion paid from planned savings does not reduce today's everyday spending money or the Last 7 days total under Spending trends. The calendar and selected-day activity still show the full recorded payment. Open What counts toward today's plan? on that day to see the split.

If the fund covered only part of an everyday purchase, the uncovered part counts toward the spending plan. A bill entered as recurring is already allowed for in the plan. A bill the planner does not recognize as recurring counts as everyday spending.

No — one covers both. Say the bill is $1,800 each January and July. Go to Budgets → Planned Expenses → Add Planned Expense and enter:

Entering the annual total is the common mistake — it would try to save double.

From there it runs itself. Starting in September, it sets aside $360/month so the full $1,800 is ready by January. When that bill arrives, click the receipt icon on the row, choose “I paid the bill” and pick the charge from your account — that link is what keeps it out of January's Expenses card. The fund then re-points itself at July 31 on its own and settles into $300/month, six months at a time, indefinitely. You never create a second one or edit the due date by hand.

What about the bill I already paid? Leave it. If you paid it before the fund existed, that money genuinely came out of that month's cash, and back-entering it would correctly record $0 as covered and change nothing. Your first real benefit is the next bill.

One caveat: when you record the payment, the transaction picker only offers charges from the month the Budgets page is currently showing. If you paid in January, switch to January first.

In the Debt Payoff Planner, you can simulate and compare different waterfall repayment methods:

• Debt Avalanche: Directs your monthly extra payments to the debt with the highest interest rate first. This is mathematically optimal and saves the most interest.
• Debt Snowball: Directs extra payments to the debt with the smallest balance first, regardless of interest rates. This is designed for behavioral success by providing quick motivational wins.

Both methods will automatically maintain minimum payments on all other outstanding debts.

You can secure your credentials with standard TOTP (Time-based One-time Password) MFA:

1. Navigate to the Settings page.
2. Under Security Settings, click Enable MFA.
3. Scan the displayed QR code using Google Authenticator, Duo, or Authy.
4. Enter the 6-digit code displayed in the authenticator app to complete the confirmation.

Once enabled, you will be prompted for this code upon every login attempt.

The Household Planner allows you to link and split budgets with family or partners:

• Invitations: Go to the Admin dashboard or Settings and enter the email of the person you want to invite. An invitation link is generated (sent via email if SMTP is configured, or shown to administrators).
• Permissions: Invited members can register under your account tree and share your budgets, debts, and transaction rule sets. You can set their access level to Read-only or full Edit permissions.

To connect bank accounts using SimpleFIN:

1. Log into your SimpleFIN dashboard at bridge.simplefin.org.
2. Generate a Setup Token. (Note: SimpleFIN Setup Tokens are one-time use and expire if not used quickly).
3. In the Financial Companion application, navigate to Settings, choose the Import & Export tab, and click Connect via SimpleFIN.
4. Paste your Setup Token into the input field and submit.
5. On the next screen, you will see a list of accounts found on your SimpleFIN feed. Select which accounts you wish to link to your local ledgers and click Link Accounts.

SimpleFIN transaction feeds are synchronized in two ways:

• Manual Sync: You can trigger a manual sync at any time by clicking the Sync Banks button on the Transactions page toolbar, or by clicking the sync icon next to the active connection status under Settings -> Import & Export.
• Automated Cron Sync: If configured by your system administrator, a background cron job runs at regular intervals (typically daily or every few hours) to fetch new transactions automatically and check them against local ledgers to prevent duplicates.

These states indicate a disruption in your connection to the SimpleFIN Bridge:

• Payment Required (402): This occurs if your SimpleFIN trial has expired or your subscription payment failed. To resolve this, log into your SimpleFIN dashboard and update your billing information. Once payment is processed, syncs will automatically resume.
• Revoked (410): The token has been explicitly deleted, expired, or reset in your SimpleFIN dashboard. To resolve this, you will need to generate a new Setup Token from bridge.simplefin.org, delete the old connection in Settings, and reconnect.

You shouldn't need to. Every Plaid or SimpleFIN sync scans for card-payment pairs — a debit on the funding account and a matching credit on the card, close in date and identical in amount, with a payment-shaped description (PAYMENT, AUTOPAY, THANK YOU, etc.) — and automatically links them as a Transfer. A linked pair shows a blue Transfer badge and is excluded from your income and expense totals, the same as a transfer you create manually.

If two payments post for the same amount within a day or two of each other, the app can't safely tell which funding transaction belongs to which card, so it deliberately leaves both unlinked rather than guess wrong. In that case:

• Pair them yourself by logging a manual Transfer between the two accounts.
• If the app links the wrong pair, open either transaction and choose Not a transfer. This separates the two without deleting them or touching either account's balance, and the app remembers not to re-link that pair on a future sync.

Never manually recategorize a card payment to anything other than Transfer — doing so would count it as real income or a real expense instead of money simply moving between your own accounts.

It depends on how the debt is set up in the Debt Planner:

• The debt follows a loan account you keep by hand (the account shows Manual and Auto-records payments): linking the checking payment records it on the loan account, marked Auto, and both balances go down. Payments linked before the debt was linked to the account are only added if you choose to record them when you link it.
• The debt follows a loan connected through Plaid or SimpleFIN: the balance comes from your lender, and the payment shows up when the bank reports it.
• The debt has no account: the debt's own balance goes down when you link the payment.

See Debt Payoff Planner → Paying a Loan You Track by Hand in the user guide.

A refund is money coming back from a purchase, not new income. The app detects returns, reversed charges, and chargebacks by their description or by Plaid's spending category, and stores them as an Expense with a positive amount rather than as income. That amount then nets against the original purchase instead of inflating your income:

$200 purchase − $75 return = $125 actually spent (not $200 spent + $75 earned)

Categorize it as whatever the original purchase was — a returned Amazon order stays tagged Shopping, for example. That credits the refund back into the right category and budget instead of leaving the purchase standing at full price.

Detection depends on the description your bank sends and the spending category it reports, so an unusually-worded credit may not be recognized and will still show as income. It's worth reviewing incoming amounts after your first few syncs.

To record a refund yourself — a cash return, or a reimbursement someone sent you for a shared expense — open New Transaction, choose Expense, and tick "This is a refund or return". Keep the same category as the original purchase. It's stored as a positive-amount expense, so it nets against that category and credits its budget back rather than inflating your income.

Never tag a refund as Transfer. That would remove it from income (correct) but leave the original purchase at full price in your expenses (incorrect) — your spending total would end up higher than what actually happened, not lower.

By default, property-tagged income and expenses are excluded from your personal Dashboard, Daily Planner, and Budgets. This ensures that large property transactions (like repairs or rental income) do not distort your household figures. You can toggle this behavior using the Personal only / Including property activity switch to fold property numbers back into your main views.

The app calculates IRS mid-month-convention straight-line depreciation for Schedule E line 18. The building and every capital improvement depreciate independently based on their placed-in-service date and asset class (27.5 years for residential, 39 years for commercial). The "Depreciation & Basis" section on your Schedule E tab shows the current year's deduction and tracks remaining basis.

This is optional and only works if your household has the bot turned on. To connect:

1. In the app, go to Settings → Notifications.
2. Under Receipt bot, click Generate link code and copy the code it shows you.
3. Open Discord and message the Financial Companion bot directly. (If you don't know where to find it, ask whoever set up the app for your household.)
4. Type /link, paste the code, and send it.
5. The bot will reply to confirm you're connected.

You can disconnect at any time from the same Settings page.

You shouldn't any more. The daily check-in now only speaks when something is new or has actually got worse. A budget still sitting at 92% tomorrow is not news, so it isn't repeated; the same budget crossing its limit is, and comes back marked Got worse.

If something still keeps appearing, you have two buttons:

• Snooze hides it for a week no matter what. Good for something you mean to come back to.
• I know never expires. Use it when you've seen the reminder and accepted it — a bill that's higher for a reason you already understand. It only returns if the situation genuinely deteriorates, and it also drops the item out of your weekly summary.

Anything urgent, like unpaid rent, is never hidden outright. Once you've been told, it collapses to a single line in a Still open list with a count of how long it's been outstanding, so it stops shouting without being forgotten.

Message the bot the way you'd ask a person — "how much did I spend on dining out this month?" — and it answers from your own data. You can also send it a photo of a receipt to save, or use quick commands like /spend today, /rent status, and /digest now. If you're connected, the app's daily check-in (unpaid rent, budgets running over, that kind of thing) also arrives as a message from the bot, with a Snooze button if you don't need to see one of them again for a week.

It cannot change anything by itself. It can propose three specific things — recategorizing one transaction, changing one category's monthly budget, or a trimmed budget plan across several categories — and each waits behind a Confirm button until you tap it. A receipt photo is the same: not saved until you confirm. Everything else it does is look-only, and it can never touch a lease, co-owner, property, payment or account. Only your own connected Discord account can see your data; nobody else's messages can. If you'd rather not use it, everything it does is also available in the app itself, and connecting is entirely optional.

Forward the receipt email to your receipts address. The app checks that mailbox every 15 minutes, reads what it finds, and puts the reading in Transactions → AI Review for you to accept or discard.

1. Set the mailbox up once in Settings → Connections → Receipt mailbox.
2. Forward a receipt to it.
3. Click Check now if you don't want to wait for the next check.

It works whether the receipt is an attachment or sits in the body of the email, as Amazon, Uber and Apple send them.

Suggestions for transactions you've already categorized some other way — by hand, with a rule, a bulk edit or a split — now leave the queue on their own. Before, only clicking Accept or Reject on the suggestion itself removed it, so the list kept growing with questions you had already answered.

For what's left:

• Accept all at 90%+ takes every suggestion at the confidence you choose. Suggestions that file a charge to a rental property or Schedule E line are skipped and wait for you.
• Dismiss all empties the queue without changing any transactions. The AI won't suggest a category for those transactions again.
• Repeated merchants are grouped, so Accept 12 on one row handles all twelve.

It shouldn't any more. Bank feeds report a transfer between two of your own accounts as two unrelated rows, so $1,000 moved into savings used to count as $1,000 of spending and $1,000 of income at the same time. The two errors cancel out at the net-worth level, which is why it went unnoticed.

The app now pairs these up each morning and excludes both sides from your income and expense totals. It is deliberately cautious: the two rows must match to the cent, be within four days, sit on different accounts of yours, and at least one must actually say "transfer". A paycheck and a rent payment of the same amount in the same week are left alone.

If it ever links the wrong pair, open either transaction and choose Not a transfer. That unlinks them without deleting anything or touching your balances, and the pair is never re-linked.

It isn't any more. If you sync a 401k, IRA or brokerage account, the payroll contribution arrives from the feed as an ordinary negative row on that account — and the app used to count it as spending, exactly like a restaurant tab.

That was worse than a miscategorization. Your paycheck deposit is reported by the bank after the contribution has already been taken out, so that money never passed through your checking account at all. Counting it invented spending that never happened, on top of money you had already never received.

Activity inside a retirement or brokerage account no longer counts as household spending or income. A contribution, a dividend paid into the account, a fund purchase — none of it reaches your budgets, your Dashboard, your Reports or your Paycheck Planner. The transactions are still there on the account, and your balances are unchanged; they simply stop being described as money you spent.

They also look like what they are. These transactions now carry a blue Transfer badge and are shown in the transfer colour rather than as a red negative amount — the same treatment a credit card payment or a checking→savings move gets. A contribution reads at a glance as money moving between your own accounts, instead of looking like a large purchase you have to think about every time you scroll past it.

It also stops asking you to categorize them. These transactions no longer appear in the Uncategorized filter on the Transactions page, in the Unassigned Expenses inbox, or in the morning summary's count of things waiting on you — and the AI won't propose categories for them either. There is nothing to decide: they don't affect any number, so filing them changes nothing.

If you ever do want to see them, filter the Transactions page to the investment account itself. Everything on that account is listed, uncategorized rows included — nothing is hidden from you when you go looking for it, and ordinary unfiltered browsing shows them as it always did.

Release 6.2.1 is a security and data-integrity release from the October 2026 review. It includes:

• invite-only sign-up;
• sessions that end 24 hours after sign-in;
• single-use two-factor codes;
• a login lockout that only counts failed attempts;
• scrambled co-owner portal links;
• a “Shares expenses from” date for co-owners;
• fixes for settled shares, manual refunds, split cents, pay periods and “database is locked” errors.

Bank disconnects and category or property deletes no longer remove more history than you asked for.

Sign-up is by invitation, because this app holds real financial data. There are two ways in:

• As your partner: invite them from Settings. This needs a Pro or administrator account.
• As a separate account: an administrator invites them from Admin → Invite a user.

The person then registers with the invited email address, or signs in with a Google account that uses it. An operator who wants open sign-up can set ALLOW_REGISTRATION=true.

Yes. A co-owner shares in expenses from their Shares expenses from date, which defaults to the day you add them. To bill earlier expenses too, edit the co-owner and tick Include all past expenses, or pick an earlier date. Shares that are already settled or waived are never changed by this, or by a change to someone’s ownership percentage.

Changing your password, email address or two-factor setting disconnects Discord. So does a change to a partner’s access. This way an old link can’t keep reading your finances. Get a new link code in Settings and send /link to the bot again. Only the account owner can link Discord.

Follow the 6.2.1 section of the Deployment Guide. In short:

• back up the database;
• add BOT_INTERNAL_KEY (and MS_OAUTH_ALLOWED_MAILBOXES if you use Microsoft sign-in for a receipt mailbox) to .env.production;
• deploy app 6.2.1, bot 1.2.1 and tracker 1.0.1 with --env-file .env.production;
• confirm port 3000 isn’t reachable from outside the server.

The five new migrations only add columns, indexes and invitation fields, and they apply at startup. Everyone signs in again after the upgrade, and owners send /link again in Discord.

Release 6.2.0 adds:

• budget alerts at 50%, 75% and 100% of a budget;
• a weekly spending report every Monday;
• settling a shared expense one co-owner at a time;
• searchable category lists;
• /feedback in Discord.

Each person has their own email switches in Settings → Notifications. The household’s Discord channel has separate toggles on the Discord card in Settings. Both features are on by default and need the server’s background jobs, which run when INTERNAL_SYNC_KEY is set.

Release 6.1.0 adds the AI debt plan advisor (Debt Planner → Build a Debt Plan with AI), budget cut plans you confirm from the AI chat, Confirm/Discard cards for those proposals in Discord, and partner connection management in Settings. It fixes the Reconcile Account adjustment option and the chat’s “context budget” error. AI explanations are optional; the calculations work without a configured model.

Back up the production database and keep its encryption key. The single new migration adds two nullable debt plan columns and applies at startup, which also takes a verified backup and refuses to continue if that backup fails. If you run the Discord bot, deploy bot image 1.1.0 as well. No new environment variables are needed. To roll back, redeploy the 6.0.0 images; they ignore the new columns.

Release 6.0.0 includes independent AI connections and task routing, dated RSI/SMA technical indicators, stock decision grade preview and evidence preparation, Research improvements, and security/data-integrity fixes. Some features require administrator activation. Production deployment and live-provider acceptance are separate from the release version.

RSI14 needs 15 completed closes; SMA50 and SMA200 need 50 and 200 consecutive sessions. A recent IPO may have RSI but no SMA200. Missing sessions, unsupported exchange calendars or mixed/legacy split adjustments prevent a verified current signal. The app shows the last completed price date; a quote is not a completed daily bar. Valid history missing the latest close retries after fifteen minutes. Stale or unverified history cannot trigger technical notifications.

Changing 1M/3M/6M/1Y changes the visible chart, while RSI uses the same final 300 completed daily bars. Use Show SMA50 or Show SMA200 for chart overlays. In a held or watched security detail, opt into technical changes in the Watchdog digest. Preferences default off, honor read-only access and snoozes, and report new conditions or material changes instead of repeating every unchanged reading. Notifications cover RSI extremes, new golden or death crosses, and trend changes such as Uptrend to Pullback; a trend counts as changed only after it holds for 3 sessions, so a one-day dip across an average stays quiet. When a cross is recent, the price chart turns on both averages and marks the cross.

They are a default-off preview of separate Long-term and Swing rules with dated reasons and factor contributions. Incomplete evidence is labeled insufficient; unsupported scope is not guessed. Predictive evaluation still requires independent frozen assessments and mature outcomes. Grades do not place trades, override your cash/reserve plan or turn political/institutional disclosures into a scoring signal.

An administrator enables the preview. For an eligible held or watched stock, explicit evidence preparation can use SEC filings and existing Finnhub/Twelve Data sources with bounded requests and visible gaps. This built-in option needs no new vendor subscription but still uses existing keys, access and quotas. Grade reads are cache-only; manual preparation/refresh and separately enabled background refresh can make provider calls. Missing peer cohorts, capital scope or reconciliations remain unavailable.

No. Technical Watchdog notifications describe verified RSI/cross changes. Stock grade alerts have separate Long-term and Swing preferences, default off, and create in-app Watchdog updates after eligible assessment changes. Baseline, recovery and policy-version gates avoid false changes; external delivery is excluded from grade-change alerts. Neither alert changes your holdings.

Public market and filing evidence can be reused across profiles. Private notes, Following, updates, assessments, exports and alert preferences remain scoped to the authorized profile/data owner according to the feature. Partner read/write permissions still apply. Personalized investment responses prevent caching; sharing public evidence does not grant access to private state.

Back up the production database and preserve its encryption key; review migration history and apply all pending migrations using the deployment procedure. Never seed an existing database. Configure/test AI task routes and history credentials before activation. Keep grade collection/automatic-refresh switches off until source readiness is verified. Production deployment, live model quality and security residual items are not certified by local tests.

Administrators open Admin → AI Settings. Start in Connections & models to add a provider, save its connection, fetch models, test capabilities and save enabled models. AI preferences contains the default model, monthly spending limit and individual features; click Save preferences to apply changes. Usage & spending shows attempts and estimated costs. Technical controls remain available under Advanced connection settings, Pricing & technical limits, Advanced compatibility tests and each feature’s Advanced limits. Unsaved preferences survive switching sections. The redesigned page follows the app’s light/dark theme and mobile layout; its settings apply to all users.

Yes. An administrator saves each provider or self-hosted endpoint as an independent named connection in Admin → AI Settings. Multiple connections to the same provider are supported too. Adding a second or third API key does not replace another connection or automatically change task routing. The administrator assigns each task to its primary model and optional approved backup.

Administrators control all model routing, including the app default and individual tasks. Users choose a chat mode, not a model. For example, an administrator can assign Simple chat to a private local model, Detailed reports to a flagship cloud model, and Receipt photos/PDFs to compatible document models. The old user model picker no longer overrides those assignments.

Select a saved connection in Admin → AI Settings and click Fetch models. The app discovers provider model IDs; stale catalogs also refresh in the background when the server scheduler is enabled. New discoveries stay disabled until the administrator tests and enables them. Refreshing preserves existing model selections and task routes. Releases using the existing API contract need no code edits; a new protocol or unsupported capability may still need integration work.

Simple chat answers general questions without loading your financial records or running application tools. Ask about my finances uses your records and tools, and can propose the supported changes for you to confirm. The mode selector identifies its configured destination. Switching modes starts a new conversation; a saved thread returns to its original mode.

No. An administrator marks the connection as local/private and opens the feature in AI preferences and checks Keep data on a local / private connection. Both its primary and backup must meet that boundary. A cloud connection cannot serve that task. This rule applies to the destination; any information you type into a chat is still sent to the selected permitted model.

A temporary network, timeout, rate-limit or server failure may use the task’s explicitly approved compatible backup. Authentication, payment, schema and context failures do not trigger a switch. Once any application tool has run, fallback stops to avoid replaying a proposal. The answer identifies when a backup served it. Submitted batches and queued research retain their original connection/model when defaults change.

Hard dollar-capped image/PDF requests are currently blocked because the app cannot reliably count their input tokens before sending them. A global monthly dollar cap also applies to these requests. An administrator can leave the relevant dollar caps blank to allow extraction with file-size, output and timeout limits. Cloud models with unknown pricing also cannot serve cost-capped requests; enter verified pricing before using those limits. Usage figures are estimates, not invoices.

Each task has its own route and capability requirements. A text model may handle Simple chat but fail image/PDF reading or finance tool calls. An administrator must save credentials, test the required capabilities, enable the chosen model and assign the task. Historical batch backfill and live source search currently have Anthropic-only adapters. Discovery and successful mock tests do not certify your live provider credentials or model quality.

Only three things, and only after you tap Confirm: recategorizing one transaction, changing one category's monthly budget amount, and a budget plan that updates several categories at once. Ask it to fix a category and you get a button in the chat rather than instructions to go and click somewhere. Ask “where can I cut back?” and you get one card listing every category's current and proposed budget; confirming saves all of them or none.

• The wording on the card is written by the app from your real data, not by the AI, so what you approve is exactly what happens.
• It is re-checked when you confirm, in case your data moved in between. If the transaction has since been split, or the budget became a one-month override, it fails with an explanation rather than writing something wrong.
• If two identical charges on the same day both match your description, it asks which one you mean instead of guessing.
• Proposals expire after a day.

Everything else — leases, co-owners, properties, payments, accounts — it can only explain, never change.

Scan or email the receipt as usual. If it lists its items and they fall into more than one category, the AI Review panel shows the proposed split with the item names under each part, and a second button appears: Attach & split.

Tax and tip are spread across the categories in proportion to what was bought rather than dropped into one, so each budget is charged what that purchase actually cost. A store-wide coupon is spread the same way. The parts always add up to the charge exactly.

Splitting is never assumed — Attach and Attach & split are separate buttons, and a receipt that only shows a total won't offer the second one.

The warning is about this month: it fires once you've spent about 80% of a budget, which is useful but by then the money is mostly gone.

The Budget review, posted in the first days of each month, looks across six months and asks a different question — are these budgets even set right? It flags budgets you miss every month (and what they'd have to be to match how you actually spend), budgets you barely touch (money parked for nothing), spending that swings too much to be a monthly line at all, subscriptions that went up in price with the annual cost, and subscriptions you haven't been charged for in 90 days.

You can also just ask for it in the AI Inbox — "are my budgets realistic?" or "where can I cut $400?" — instead of waiting.

Ask the assistant exactly that. It lists the bills due before your next paycheck, your debt minimums, this paycheck's share of any Planned Expenses, and what's left as free cash.

Planned Expense set-asides are divided across the paychecks in a month rather than repeated — a $300/month planned expense takes about $138 out of a biweekly paycheck, not $300, or you'd fund every target more than twice over.

If the paycheck doesn't stretch, it says by how much and names what would go unfunded rather than quietly trimming a line to make it fit. It's a plan only: nothing is recorded or moved.

On the 1st of each month the app closes out the month that just ended and posts a month in review: budgeted against spent, which categories went over, and a checklist of anything still open.

The checklist covers four things, each with what to do about it: accounts that stopped syncing before month-end, transactions with no category, decisions still waiting in the AI review panel, and rent that hasn't been reconciled. Going over budget is reported but never counts as unfinished — that's information about a month that's already over, not a task.

Check the Activity list in Settings → Connections → Receipt mailbox — it says what happened to each message. The two common causes:

• The message is listed as Held. The sender hasn't been approved yet. Click Approve and that email is read immediately — you don't need it sent again.
• The email is older than the mailbox connection. Mail that arrived more than a day before you connected is skipped on purpose, so switching the feature on doesn't pull in years of history. Forward it again.

No. The address is expected to be public — you hand it to vendors — so the app trusts the sender, not the address. Mail from an address you haven't approved is held, listed in Settings, and never read until you approve it. Mail that fails your provider's forgery checks is held too, even if it claims to come from someone you've already approved. And nothing reaches your ledger until you accept the reading.

Yes. In Settings → Connections → Receipt mailbox, set After a message is processed to mark it read, move it to a folder, or delete it. The default leaves your mail alone.

Moving is the safest choice — your inbox stays clean and the originals are still there if a receipt is ever disputed. Mail waiting on your sender approval is never touched, so you can still approve it later.

When you add (or edit) the expense, tick "I'll cover this myself — don't split with co-owners" on the transaction form — it only appears once you've selected a property. Nothing gets charged to any co-owner for that expense.

If the expense was already split before you realized, open the Shared Expenses tab and click Cover This Myself on that row instead. Either way, each co-owner's share isn't deleted — it's marked waived at $0.00, so there's still a record in the ledger and their statements of what got excluded and why. A share that's already been settled (they already paid you) is left alone either way.

Open the expense, pick the property, and look for the Shared with row underneath — you and each co-owner, all switched on. Tap the person who isn’t part of this bill and they come off it. The bill is then split between whoever is left, in the same proportion as their ownership.

A worked example: a $60 internet charge on a property you own 34% of, shared with two housemates at 33% each. Switch one of them off and it becomes $29.55 for the housemate who’s on it and $30.45 for you — the line under the names always shows what each person ends up owing before you save.

If you’d rather absorb the absent person’s portion yourself instead of splitting it with the others, switch Their portion to I cover it: the remaining housemate stays at their usual $19.80 and you cover $40.20.

No. The same Shared with row appears in two places that repeat for you:

• On an automation rule (Recurring → Rules) — set the rule’s property, choose who’s on it, and every matching charge that syncs in from then on lands split the right way.
• On a property’s Recurring Expense Templates — for shared bills you record yourself rather than ones that arrive from the bank.

You can still change any individual month’s charge afterwards; the rule only decides how new ones start out.

Yes — switch You off in the Shared with row. The co-owners still on the expense cover all of it between them, in proportion to their ownership. It’s the mirror image of “I’ll cover this myself”, so turning one on releases the other.

One person always has to be left holding the expense, so you can’t switch everybody off at once.

Whatever you set for them — nothing happens automatically beyond that. Under Setup → Edit Co-Owner, pick a frequency: Immediate, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Muted to turn it off entirely, plus whether they should also get a text. On that cadence, they get one itemized email of what they currently owe — each expense listed with its status and amount, not just a running total — and only if they actually owe something.

You can also notify someone immediately at any time, independent of their schedule, from the bell icon on their balance card in Shared Expenses. This will show an immediate delivery confirmation toast on screen.

To verify when your partners were notified without cluttering your inbox, you can rely on the real-time "Last notified" status displayed directly on their balance cards, or view the Notification Delivery & Audit card in their detail modal. If you prefer to receive email confirmations, you can change your Owner Email Confirmation setting to Lightweight Delivery Receipt or Full CC Copy.

Click Settle on any pending expense row (or select multiple expenses and click Settle Selected) in the Shared Expenses tab to open the Settle & Link modal.

From the modal, you can:

• Link real bank deposits: Select the actual incoming Zelle, Venmo, wire, or check transactions from your bank feed. The candidate deposit picker searches across the 250 most recent deposit transactions.
• Settle in installments: If your co-owner sends 2 or 3 payments (e.g. two $1,000 deposits for a $2,000 bill), check multiple deposit transactions to link them all together.
• Handle partial payments: If they only pay part of the balance, the paid portion is settled and the exact remaining balance is automatically kept as an active pending share.
• Protect personal budget numbers: Linked deposit transactions are automatically flagged as Transfer / Reimbursement so they won't count as taxable personal income or distort your household budget.

You can also use the Settlement Inbox banner at the top of the tab: whenever a bank-synced deposit matches a pending share, click Review & Settle to open the modal with the deposit pre-matched for 1-click confirmation.

Yes! In the Paycheck Planner, the system runs an automated background scheduler every morning. When your scheduled payday arrives (based on your configured Pay Frequency and Anchor Pay Date), the app automatically creates a Draft Pay Period in the background.

The draft automatically calculates estimated household expenses (from your budget targets or actual transaction spending) and matches member incomes by scanning for transactions tagged with each member's designated keyword. When you open the Paycheck Planner or view your Dashboard widget, you'll see a prominent Draft Pay Period banner showing the pre-calculated allocation. You can click "Sync with Bank" to refresh with newly cleared transactions, and click "Approve & Settle" with one tap to finalize it into your permanent history.

You can update existing pay periods with a single click using the 1-Click Pay Period Sync feature:

On the Current Period tab, click the "Sync Period" button next to "Edit Period". In the History & Trends list, click the sync icon () on any individual pay period row, or click "Sync All" at the top of the history list to re-sync all recorded pay periods at once. Syncing automatically recalculates transaction expenses, refreshes budget targets, and matches new income deposits without losing manual adjustments.

The Household Planner features Automated Deficit Carryover. If a member's income for a pay period is insufficient to cover their share of expenses and personal obligations (resulting in a negative payout / amount owed), that deficit automatically rolls over into their next pay period.

In the next pay period, the prior deficit is automatically deducted from that member's new positive payout (for example, a -$100 deficit followed by a +$300 base payout automatically resolves to a true net payout of +$200). This automatically keeps the joint/household accounts whole without requiring manual interim bank transfers between partners.

When you select "Use Actual Spending (Transactions)" in the pay period form, the system automatically excludes bank account withdrawals used to pay off credit cards (e.g. Bank of America Online PMT, Amex EPayment) and internal transfers between your own accounts.

Because the individual purchases made on your credit cards (groceries, utilities, dining, flights) are already captured in your transaction list, excluding the credit card payoff payments prevents those expenses from being counted twice. Meanwhile, external obligations like mortgage and housing bills remain fully counted as shared household expenses.

Individual member obligations—such as personal loan payments (e.g. LB XFER)—are tracked as Personal Expenses rather than shared household expenses. The planner decides who a charge belongs to in two ways, in order:

1. The transaction carries that member's Default Tag, the same tag used to match their paychecks.
2. The transaction is filed under that member's Personal Spending Category, or any sub-category beneath it.

Anything matching neither is treated as a shared household expense. The tag wins where both apply, so it doubles as a one-off override for a charge filed in the wrong place.

Personal expenses are deducted directly from that specific member's individual payout share at the end of the allocation waterfall, ensuring that each partner pays their own personal loan out of their take-home cash rather than burdening the other partner.

Changed in v4.5.2: earlier versions also matched a member's name against the transaction description. That charged shared spending to whoever's name it happened to contain—a grocery run to SAM'S CLUB landed on Sam, and Jimmy John's on Jim—so it has been removed in favour of the category link described below.

Link the member to the category. If you keep a Personal budget with a Jim and a Sam sub-budget underneath it, go to Household → Members and set each member's Personal Spending Category to their own sub-category.

From then on, anything you file under that category—or anything nested beneath it—is charged to that person alone and is held out of the household's shared expenses. There is nothing to tag per transaction; the filing you already do is what the planner reads.

Leave the field on Not tracked separately and nothing changes: that member is matched by their Default Tag only, exactly as before.

Two things worth knowing:

• If your pay periods draw expenses from budgets rather than actual transactions, a linked member's budget is now held out of the shared total too. Previously the whole Personal budget was billed to the household and the same spending was deducted from that person's payout — the same money charged twice.
• Avoid putting an amount on the parent Personal budget if its children already carry amounts. That is the same money counted twice over. The planner holds such an amount out of the shared total rather than guessing whose it is, but the cleanest setup leaves the parent as a grouping header with no amount of its own.

To automatically track and divide a recurring charge (such as an electric, gas, water, or insurance bill) between a rental property and personal expenses, follow this two-step setup:

Step 1: Create a Custom Split Rule

• Navigate to Recurring & Rules (/recurring).
• In the Create Automation Rule form, enter a Rule Name (e.g., Electric Bill Split) and Matching Keywords (e.g., ENERGY CO).
• Under Additional Actions & Filters, toggle on Split Transaction.
• Choose Percentage (%) or Fixed Amount ($):
  • Split #1: Set allocation (e.g., 60% or $150.00) → Destination: Rental Property (select your property, e.g. Rental Property A, and Schedule E line, e.g. Utilities).
  • Split #2: Set allocation (e.g., 40% or remainder) → Destination: Personal (select your personal category, e.g. Utilities).
• Click Create Rule.

Step 2: Track the Bill's Due Date & Cycle

• Switch to the Track a Bill tab on the Recurring page and click + Track New Bill.
• Enter the Bill Name, matching keyword (e.g., ENERGY CO), estimated amount, and due date.
• Click Save.

How It Works Going Forward:

• Automated Bank Sync: When the bank charge posts, the rule automatically splits the charge with exact penny precision.
• Tax & Budget Reporting: The property portion flows directly to your property's Schedule E report, while the personal portion flows to your personal household budget.
• Payment Tracking: The bill tracker detects the synced charge and automatically marks the cycle as Paid for the month.

The Transaction Rule engine evaluates rules using a deterministic specificity ranking algorithm and enforces first-match termination during ingestion:

1. Specificity Ranking (Narrower Rules Win):

Before matching, all active rules are ranked by their specificity score based on how many optional narrowing filters they define:

• Highest Priority (Score 2): Rules scoped to a specific financial account and a specific transaction direction (Credit vs. Debit) — e.g. AMEX Gold + Debit + "Home Depot" → Property A / Repairs.
• Medium Priority (Score 1): Rules scoped to either a specific account or a direction (e.g. AMEX Gold + Any Direction + "Home Depot" or Any Account + Debit + "Home Depot").
• Generic Priority (Score 0): Catch-all global rules with no account restriction and direction set to All (e.g. Any Account + All + "Home Depot" → Supplies).

Because rules are sorted by specificity, a more specific rule will always take precedence over a generic rule, regardless of which rule was created first.

2. First-Match Termination:

During live ingestion (Plaid bank syncs, SimpleFIN polling, and CSV imports), the engine evaluates rules sequentially down the sorted specificity list and halts immediately upon finding the first match. Only the winning rule applies its categories, tags, notes, budgets, property tax attribution, or split allocations (calculateRuleSplits). Lower-ranked matching rules are never executed for that transaction.

3. Batch & Morning Triage Runs:

During the automated daily Morning Triage (and manual runs via POST /api/rules/run), the rule engine runs deterministically on uncategorized transactions before any AI categorization takes place. Transactions categorized or split by a rule drop out of the uncategorized backlog, preventing redundant evaluations and avoiding unnecessary AI model costs.

Either way works, and you can mix them. If you link a brokerage account under Accounts and that institution reports positions, each sync brings your holdings in automatically — symbol, share count, and current value — and keeps them current. Not every institution reports positions; plenty only report transactions.

If yours doesn't, or you want to track something held elsewhere, use Add holding on the Portfolio tab. Only symbol, account, and share count are required. Cost basis is optional but it's what unlocks your gain/loss figures, and current value is only used as a stand‑in until live prices arrive.

No, and not by policy — by construction. The bank connection the app uses is read‑only at the protocol level, so there is no credential here capable of placing an order and no code path from any screen to a broker. The Money Advisor and the rebalancing view produce numbers and suggestions; acting on them is something you do yourself, at your brokerage.

Live prices, symbol search, and news all come from a market data provider that needs an API key configured on the server. Until an administrator sets one (Admin → Deployment Guide → Environment Variables), those three things stay quiet.

Nothing else breaks in the meantime: your share counts, cost basis, totals, and the Money Advisor all still work from whatever values your brokerage reported or you entered by hand. Prices simply won't refresh on their own.

Only the ones it actually reports on. Three rules govern this:

• A position you typed is replaced only by the same position from the same account. Something you hand‑entered in an account your brokerage doesn't report on will never be touched by a sync.
• A sync reporting no positions never empties an account. An outage or a quiet response can't silently wipe your portfolio.
• Closing a position sets it to zero shares rather than deleting it, so its history survives and your past portfolio values stay correct.

Because it's drawn from your own recorded history rather than bought from a data provider. The app snapshots each position's value as prices come in, so the chart begins on the day you start tracking and fills in from there.

The alternative would be back‑filling a curve from historical prices — which would draw a past that never happened in your account, since it can't know when you actually bought, sold, or added to a position. An honest short chart was preferred to a convincing wrong one.

No. It applies a conventional priority order — starter buffer, high‑rate debt, full emergency reserve, tax‑advantaged investing, then ordinary investing — to your own balances, rates, and average spending, and shows every figure it used. It is arithmetic with its reasoning printed, not a recommendation from a professional who knows your situation.

Every plan also ends with what it can't see: an employer 401(k) match (usually the best return available anywhere, and invisible to this app), your remaining contribution room and tax position, insurance gaps and dependants, and the fact that the line between paying down debt and investing is a convention rather than a calculation. All of the thresholds are settings you can change.

Because of where its rate falls, and it will say so explicitly rather than just leaving it out. Debt below the low‑rate threshold (4% by default) gets a note explaining that paying it early is a guaranteed return at that rate, while investing instead has historically beaten it without the guarantee — and that you should keep paying the minimum either way. Debt sitting between the low and high thresholds gets a different note saying plainly that neither answer is clearly right and this one is a preference, not a calculation.

If you'd rather it treated that debt as urgent, lower the high‑rate threshold in your plan settings and it will move into the payment steps.

Alerts arrive in your AI Inbox for a large single‑day move in a position, a notable swing in your total portfolio, one holding growing into an outsized share of the whole, a watchlist price target being crossed, upcoming earnings for something you own, and a brokerage that has stopped syncing.

On Saturday mornings you also get a weekly portfolio note — how the week went, which positions moved, and what the news said. It's written as a review of a week that's already over, and contains no recommendations. Watchlist entries with no price target set never generate alerts; setting a high or low target is what turns a watched symbol into something the app can raise with you.

It is a budget estimate for your everyday purchases today. The app starts with the spending plan you chose, allows for applicable recurring bills, subtracts everyday spending already recorded this month, and divides what is left by the remaining days — including today.

Open How this is worked out to see that division (for example “$844 left ÷ 17 days”). The page then subtracts today's everyday purchases to show what remains for today.

It is deliberately not your bank balance. A balance still contains next week's rent.

Check whether that bill has been entered on the Recurring Bills page. The planner can only allow for bills it knows about; an unrecognized payment counts as everyday spending and can sharply reduce today's amount.

Add rent, loan and utility payments as recurring bills. The payment will still appear in the calendar and selected day's transactions, while its planned cost is allowed for in the spending plan. If today's amount drops on the same date each month, review your recurring bills.

Money moving between your own accounts — savings transfers, credit card payments — needs nothing done to it. Those are already categorized as Transfer and were never counted as spending.

Only the ones that are the same amount every month and that you cannot choose not to pay — rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, loan and car payments, subscriptions.

Leave everything else alone. Groceries, fuel, coffee and online shopping repeat too, but they are spending you actually control, so they belong in everyday spending. Marking them as bills would remove them from today's spending figure.

The Recurring page can scan your last 90 days and suggest candidates if you would rather not enter them by hand.

Because the remaining pool is re-divided across the days you have left, an expensive day reduces the targets for the remaining days. Spending $150 on a day with a $50 target trims a few dollars a day off the rest of the month.

The reverse is also true: a quiet week lifts the daily figure gently rather than banking a lump sum that makes one day look extravagant.

If you want to know where the month is heading, open Spending trends for the month-end estimate.

Choose a source under How this is worked out → Spending plan settings:

• Your income settings — monthly income less your savings target. Every recurring bill is reserved from the remainder.
• Your category budgets — the total from the Budget page. Only bills that sit in a category you actually budgeted are reserved, so a bill you never budgeted for is not subtracted twice.
• A custom daily amount you type in, which is taken as spending money exactly as entered.

A saved custom amount takes priority over category budgets. If none of these is set up, the planner asks you to set up a plan. Open How this is worked out to see the source currently in use.