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Connecting your first account

SageFin is not much use until it can see an account, so this is the first thing to do and the only thing that has to happen in order. It is also how you add a new account later, so this page is worth knowing about twice.

Adding an account

Go to Accounts and choose Add account. There are three ways in:

The first two connect through a data provider. The third you maintain yourself: there is nothing to connect, and the balance changes when you change it.

You do not give SageFin your bank password

Worth being explicit about, because it is the part people are right to be careful about.

Choosing a bank opens a window belonging to Plaid, a data provider used by thousands of finance apps. You sign in to your bank there. SageFin never sees those credentials — what we receive back is permission to read the account, not the means to log in as you.

You can see which provider is behind any account later, on its Connection status card. It is the answer to "who has my bank login", and the answer is not us.

What happens in the next few minutes

Your accounts and balances appear almost at once. Names, types and current balances come back with the connection.

Transactions follow, and there are usually a lot of them. A first connection brings in about the last three months of history, so expect the transactions page to fill up rather than trickle. For anything older, import a file.

They arrive already categorized. Everything is sorted as it lands — from what SageFin has learned about a merchant, or from a model reading the merchant, amount and date. It is right most of the time and wrong some of the time, which is normal and fixable; why a transaction landed in that category explains what decided it and how to make a correction stick.

Recurring charges are picked out. Subscriptions and bills that repeat get spotted and offered to you for review rather than assumed.

Nothing is waiting on you while this happens. You can close the tab.

The first few things worth doing

Look at the categories on a page of transactions. Not to fix everything — to see what SageFin guessed, and to notice the two or three merchants it consistently gets wrong. Those are worth a rule.

Add anything that will not connect. A cash envelope, a car, a mortgage held somewhere obscure. A manual account is a real account here: it counts in your net worth and your budgets, it simply does not update itself.

Try a budget once there is history. SageFin can fill the amounts in from what you have actually been spending, per category, so a first budget is a matter of adjusting numbers rather than inventing them — which is the difference between a budget you keep and one you abandon in a fortnight.

If a connection does not work

Some banks refuse, some ask for a code, some need approving from inside their own site. That is common enough to have its own page, which also covers what to do when an account that was working stops.

What comes next