Sharing a household

Money in SageFin belongs to a household, not to a person. That is the single idea everything else here follows from — and it is what you are choosing when you share SageFin with a partner, a spouse or anyone else you keep money with.

Everyone in a household sees the same money

Accounts, balances, transactions, budgets, goals, categories, rules, receipts and reports are the household's. Every member sees all of it, and any member can change most of it.

There is no per-person view of a shared account, and no way to hide an account from one member and not another. If two people need separate finances, they need separate households.

A few things stay yours rather than the household's — your profile, your display name and photo, and your own notifications. Yours to change, that is: the other members of your household can see your name and your photo.

Owners and members

Two roles, and the difference is narrower than you might expect.

Members can do the everyday work: connect accounts, categorize, write rules, build budgets, add receipts, run reports.

Owners can do all of that, and a handful of things members cannot:

• change household settings — name, time zone, currency
• change household preferences
• add a member
• remove a member
• make another member an owner, or step down to member themselves
• record that a member has died

Ownership is about who administers the household, not about who is trusted with the money.

A household can have more than one owner, and usually should. Owners are not ranked: each one can do everything on that list, including making someone else an owner. If you are the only owner, SageFin says so on the members page, because you are the only person who can fix it — and once you cannot act, nobody can make anyone else an owner. Making your partner an owner takes one click and is the difference between them carrying on and them being locked out of everything but the numbers.

An owner can step down to member whenever somebody else is an owner. A household never has zero owners: the last one cannot step down or be removed.

Adding someone

In household settings, add them by email address. One of two things happens, and the page says which.

If they already have a SageFin account, they join straight away. Nothing else to do.

If they do not, we email them an invitation. SageFin is invite-only while it is in beta, so that invitation is also what lets them create an account at all. They appear under Invited until they sign in for the first time, which is the moment they actually join — nothing of yours is shared with them before that.

An invitation lasts 30 days, and you can Resend or Withdraw it any time before it is accepted. Withdrawing stops the emailed link working.

Resending sends a genuinely new invitation, not a copy of the old one — a new link, and another 30 days. The previous link stops working the moment you do it, so if they find the first email later it will not let them in. Use the newest one.

One case SageFin will refuse: an address that already has its own household. Households cannot be merged, so that person has to leave theirs before joining yours.

Only an owner can add someone, or withdraw an invitation.

Removing someone

An owner can remove a member at any time. The household's data stays exactly where it is — accounts, transactions, rules, everything. What changes is that the removed person can no longer see any of it.

Their own account still exists; it simply has no household attached.

Leaving, and deleting your account

Deleting your SageFin account is self-serve, in Settings → Security, and what happens to the household depends on who you are.

If you are the only person in it, the household's data is deleted with you. There is nobody left to keep it.

If you are a member and others remain, you leave and the household carries on untouched. Your user account goes; the shared money data stays with the people still in it.

If you are an owner and others remain, you can leave as long as another owner does not leave with you — make someone else an owner first if you are the only one. The last owner's deletion is refused, because it would leave everyone else with data nobody administers.

What leaving does to the data you added: it stays. Your accounts, transactions, budgets and goals belong to the household, and they keep working. Your own things go — your notifications, your API tokens, your chats with Sage — and your name comes off what is left, which afterwards reads as "a former member". Banks you linked stop syncing, because the login behind them was yours: the household keeps that history, and can link the same bank again with its own login.

Before you go, it is worth taking your transactions with you — export is in Settings → Data.

If someone dies

SageFin has one honest answer here and one thing worth doing in advance.

Do this now, while everyone can: make sure your household has two owners. It takes a click, and it is the only step that cannot be taken later.

Recording it

An owner opens the member's row in Settings → Members and chooses Record that they died. That does four things:

• their sign-in stops working, so an account nobody is watching cannot be used
• their API tokens are revoked
• notifications and email digests to them stop
• if they were an owner, they step down, so the household still has one

It is not account deletion, and it can be undone. Everything they entered stays exactly where it is, with their name on it. If it was recorded by mistake, an owner can undo it: the sign-in works again, though their old role and their API tokens do not come back.

Their bank connections

A connection uses one person's login at the bank, and after a death it will stop working — usually when the bank closes or freezes the account. Nobody else can, or should, sign in as them to fix it.

• An account you hold jointly: link it again with your own login, then use Transfer data on the old account to move its history onto the new one, and remove the old connection.
• An account only in their name: the executor deals with the bank. SageFin keeps what was already synced as a record.

If the only owner has died

Nobody left in the household can manage it — that is the case the two-owner step above prevents. Everyone keeps using the household's money as before; what nobody can do is invite, remove or change anyone.

Email [email protected] with a photo or scan of the death certificate. Then:

• We write back to the address you sign in to SageFin with, not simply reply, and ask you to confirm. That is how we know the request came from you.
• We make you an owner — only the person asking. If someone else in the household should run it, they need to write in themselves.
• We record the death first. That emails the address on their account to say so, then does everything Recording it does and ends their bank connections.
• Then we wait seven days before making anyone an owner. That email gives them until a named date to tell us they are alive, and the wait is what makes the date mean something. It is not us being slow — if you hear nothing for a week, nothing has gone wrong.
• Everyone in the household is told when the owner changes. That notice cannot be switched off.

We cannot undo a handover from our side, so we check before we act. If anything here was a mistake, write to us straight away.

If nobody is left in the household

An executor or administrator can ask for the household's data. Write to [email protected] with a certified copy of the death certificate and the court document appointing you — letters testamentary, letters of administration, or your jurisdiction's equivalent. We answer within 60 days.

None of this is legal advice, and SageFin is not an estate service. What it holds is a record of accounts and spending, not the accounts themselves: money moves through the banks, and only they can transfer it.

Receipts and household members

Anyone in the household can email receipts in from their own address, with nothing to set up — membership is the permission. Addresses outside the household need enrolling first, and that is covered in emailing receipts into SageFin.