Accounts you keep yourself

Not everything can be connected, and not everything should be. A house, a car, cash in a drawer, a crypto wallet, a bank that will not link — all of these can live in SageFin as accounts you maintain.

A manual account is a real account

It counts in your net worth. It appears in reports. You can add transactions to it, categorize them, budget against them.

The only difference is that nothing updates it. The balance changes when you change it, which also means it never breaks, never asks you to sign in again, and never disagrees with your bank — because there is no bank to disagree with. Its Connection status card says so rather than showing a provider.

Adding one

Accounts → Add account, then either the category that fits — Property & other assets covers houses, vehicles and crypto — or any other type if you are standing in for a bank that would not connect.

Give it a name you will recognize and a starting balance. That is the whole of it.

Updating the balance

Open the account and edit it. The new figure becomes today's balance, and SageFin records it as a point in that account's history rather than overwriting what came before.

That matters more than it sounds: a chart of your house's value over three years is built from the handful of times you updated it, not from a guess. It is why updating a manual account occasionally is worth doing even when nothing has changed much — each update is a fact the history can be drawn through.

Hiding, closing and deleting are three different things

Easy to confuse, and only one is reversible in the ordinary sense.

Hide takes the account off your Accounts page and leaves everything else alone. Its transactions still count, its balance still counts, and you can unhide it. Use it for clutter.

Close marks the account as finished — a card you canceled, a loan you paid off. The history stays and the account stops being treated as live. SageFin will offer to set the balance to zero, and keeping the account is usually right: closing it is what makes last year's spending still make sense.

Delete removes the account and its transactions. There is no undo, and your reports for past months will change, because the spending that lived there is gone.

If you are unsure, hide it. You can always decide properly later.

Credit cards and loans, and why the sign looks odd

SageFin shows what you owe as a positive number: a card with £400 outstanding reads as £400 of liability, not −£400. Net worth subtracts it.

Providers are not consistent about which way round they send it, so occasionally a liability arrives looking like an asset — a credit card apparently adding to your net worth. If a card or a loan is counting the wrong way, check the account's type first: the sign follows the type, so a credit card recorded as a savings account will behave exactly like one.

Moving an account's history somewhere else

If you replaced an account — a new card after a bank switch, the same mortgage at a new provider — you do not have to choose between losing the history and having two of everything. Transfer data moves transactions and balances from the old account to the new one.

The old account's history stops at the transfer date rather than being deleted, which is the honest answer to what was this account worth in March after its transactions have gone elsewhere.