Updates

Today, I’m excited to launch Manual Connections. While Balance has exclusively supported connecting accounts via Plaid, you’ll now be able to add and manage accounts on your own. Manual connections are ideal for accounts not supported by Plaid or accounts that you prefer to track manually.

For manual accounts, you’ll have full control over your transactional data. You can import transactions in bulk by uploading a CSV or add them individually as you go—right in the app. Manual accounts and transactions seamlessly integrate with your existing financial data, including net worth calculations and financial analytics, giving you a more holistic view of your finances.

Balance is now available in Canada! 🇨🇦

You can now connect to leading Canadian financial institutions, including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Canada Trust, Bank of Montreal, CIBC, and more. Canada is the first country outside the U.S. where Balance supports financial institution connections.

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to reach out—I’d love to hear from you!

Introducing a new and improved onboarding experience. The onboarding flow provides a guided tour to help you get started and explore the app.

Receive alerts when your account balance is running low. Avoid surprise charges or overdraft fees by setting up alerts for your accounts. Configure the amount by setting up the alert on your Accounts page. Select a depository account, click “Set Up Alert”, and set an amount. If your account balance drops below this amount, Balance will notify you via email.

Introducing the Balance PWA (Progressive Web App) for a better mobile experience. Follow the installation instructions below to add the Balance on your home screen. Introducing the Balance App for a Better Mobile Experience

iOS

1. Open Safari and navigate to https://app.balance.day.
2. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap the Add to Home Screen button.
4. Tap Add in the top right corner.

Android

1. Open Chrome and navigate to https://app.balance.day.
2. Tap the three dots in the top right corner.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add in the bottom right corner.
5. Open the app from your home screen.

Enjoy the new Balance PWA experience!

Today, I’m thrilled to introduce one of the most impactful features in Balance. Transaction Trends and Views.

With Transaction Trends, you can now track trends over time to uncover spending patterns and gain valuable insights into your finances. Apply filters to dive deeper into your data, and link life events to financial changes to see how they impact your financial health. Trends empower you to make informed decisions and stay in control of your finances.

Next up are Views. You can save custom filters as Views, allowing you to access your most important financial data quickly. A new link on your sidebar lets you easily navigate to your saved Views. Create Views for Transactions, Transfers, and Investments to streamline your finances.

Filter transactions, transfers, and investment activities by a time frame. Previously, you could filter your financial data using static dates, but using time frames, you can filter data dynamically. Use time frame filters like “Last 30 days”, or “Last 3 months”, or “Last 1 year”, to filter data in a more flexible way.

Introducing authentication with Google. You can now use your Google account to sign in to Balance. If you have previously logged in with email and password, link your Google account by simply signing in with Google.

A small change that makes filtering easier. Filter your transactions, transfers, and investments with the new date helpers.

This release brings improvements to category management.

• Assign colors to your categories: Personalize categories by assigning colors to them.
• Editing and Deleting categories: Edit or delete categories from the category options by clicking on the category name.

Other improvements and fixes

• Add filtering capabilities to Transfers and Investments.
• Fixed link to Transfers in the Daily Digest email.

Introducing the all new, improved search in Balance. You can now conveniently search for transactions, payees, bank accounts, and categories — all in one place. And, the search is typo-tolerant, so the occasional slip-up is not a problem.

Having the ability to quickly search across all your financial data is key to understanding your money. With the improved search, you no longer need to sift through bank statements and browser tabs looking for answers — you can find them right here inside Balance.

Today, I’m super excited to launch Filters. Filtering your financial data is an underrated yet extremely powerful mechanism for finding the data you are looking for. It helps you narrow down the results and gain a deeper insight into your finances.

With Filters, you can easily answer questions such as, “What’s my total spending on dining out in the last 3 months?” or “Have I been setting aside sufficient funds for emergencies lately?” Whether you’re seeking broad insights or delving into deeper specifics, Filters empowers you to sift through your finances with ease and clarity.

Balance currently supports the following filters:

• Date: Filter by a start and end date
• Account: Filter by your bank accounts
• State: Filter by Pending or Cleared
• Direction: Filter by Inflow or Outflow
• Amount: Filter by amount using various operators
• Payee: Filter by payee names

I’m thrilled to announce the first release of Investments.

You can now connect your investment accounts such as brokerage, 401K, IRA, and more. Balance will sync your holdings along with any investment transactions.

You can also track current market prices for your investments to see the real-time value of your assets. Lastly, your net worth will factor in your portfolio value, allowing you to track your investment performance over time.

A couple of things to note:

• Unfortunately, Plaid does not support Fidelity accounts anymore. I’m exploring other ways to allow connecting Fidelity accounts in the meantime.
• Investments is a beta release, so some things need to be polished. If you encounter any bugs or data discrepancies, please let me know.

Introducing Transactions Export. Tax season is almost upon us. If you need to send a list of transactions to your accountant, Balance can assist you. Navigate to the Transactions page, apply filters to narrow down the results (e.g., Category: Business, Account: Business Account, Direction: Outflow), and select Export Transactions from the transaction options dropdown. Balance will generate a CSV file containing the list of transactions that you can share with your accountant.

Optionally, you can export these transactions to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to run your own simulations.

Until next time!

Introducing Payment and Transfer Detection. To ensure accurate calculation of breakdown values, it is important to correctly classify payments and transfers. Previously, this process was manual, and there was a risk of missing out on marking transactions as transfers or payments. From now on, Balance will automatically detect your payments and transfers and create them for you.

The transfer matching criteria are as follows:

• Both transfer transactions are cleared and not pending from the merchant.
• Transactions are of the same amount but opposite in polarity.
• Both transactions occur within 7 days of each other.

Balance also detects the type of transfer.

• Payment, if money is moved into a Liability account like a credit card or a loan account.
• Transfer, if the money was moved to a Depository account like checking, savings, etc.

Note that some detected transfers may be invalid and false positives. In such cases, you can delete them, and Balance will not recreate them again. The daily digest email will include a link to all detected transfers for the day.

Introducing a new dashboard widget: Expense Distribution. Expense Distribution shows how your transactions are distributed across different categories. The categories are ordered based on highest expenses. Clicking on a category will show you the transactions for those categories so you can dig in even deeper. This will give you a sense of where your money is being spent.

Track transaction categories on your Balance dashboard. By tracking categories on your dashboard, you can actively analyze your spending habits, identify areas where you can save money, and make more effective financial choices.

To track a category, click on the category name on a transaction and select “Track on dashboard”.

Check out this video for more information:

Visualize your cash flow using the new Cash Flow chart. This chart shows the difference between your inflow and outflow each month. Categorize your transactions as Transfers or Payments to ensure accurate representation.

You can now see the differences in your breakdowns compared to the previous month. These differences will be shown as percentages and amounts.

Here’s a quick summary of how it works:

• The change indicator for Inflow and Assets will be green if the current month’s amount is higher than the previous month’s amount, indicating an increase in your Inflow and Assets.
• The change indicator for Outflow and Liabilities will be red if the current month’s amount is higher than the previous month’s amount. This indicates an increase in your expenses or debt.
• The change indicator for Transfers and Payments will remain gray.

Introducing transaction categories! Now you can view the categories associated with a transaction. Balance will automatically fetch categories from the financial data aggregator. However, you also have the flexibility to modify or add new categories.

This release also introduces the ability to select multiple transactions by holding down the Shift key. Alternatively, you can select all transactions on the page by using Cmd + A / Ctrl + A. This allows you to quickly assign categories to multiple transactions at once.

Unlike other tools, Balance lets you assign multiple categories to a transaction. Think of categories as “tags” that provide context. For instance, you can tag a transaction as “Business Expense” and “Office Supplies”. This enables you to easily see all transactions categorized as business expenses and also provides a breakdown of categories within your business expenses.

Other improvements in this release

• Clicking on a category will filter transactions by that category.
• Improved the mobile layout for transactions.
• The experience of marking transactions as transfers has been enhanced. Instead of being directed to a new page to select a transfer, you can now mark the transaction as a transfer in a pop-up dialog that appears when you click “Mark as transfer.”
• Better and consistent logos for institutions.

The institutions page has a new design giving you a complete view of all your accounts in one place. The new design is also consistent with the rest of the app and allows you to perform bulk actions on institutions and their accounts. With the multi-selection feature, you can conveniently filter transactions from different accounts based on your specific requirements.

Another improvement in this release is the ability to rename your accounts. Simply click on the institution or account name and select the option to change the display name. The new name you choose will be updated across the app, including the transactions page. This feature is especially handy when you have multiple accounts connected from the same institution, such as yourself and your partner.

These features also lay the foundation of what’s coming up next, which is filtering. Being able to filter your financial data is immensely powerful and provides you with accurate insights. Stay tuned for more updates!

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy this release.

Capture payments and transfers to keep track of your money movement. Select a transaction and click “Mark as Transfer”. Balance will show you potential payment/transfer matches. After selecting the matching transaction, the two will be linked. Additionally, you can choose a transfer type of Payment (e.g. for credit card or loan payments) or Transfer (e.g. for moving money between accounts).

Payments and Transfers will appear on your dashboard in the Breakdown section. Tracking your transfers and payments helps you understand how much of your monthly spending goes towards debt payments.

Hey there! I’m thrilled to show you the first look at Balance! While Balance is still in its early stages of development, its goal is to help you gain an in-depth understanding of your finances.

Here’s what’s included in the first release.

Connect your financial institutions
Having all your financial data in one place is essential to taking control of your money. Balance allows you to connect your bank accounts directly inside the app. This syncs your transactions and balances from these institutions and makes finding answers about your finances easier. Balance currently works with over 10,000 US institutions through Plaid.

Review your dashboard
The dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view of your financial health. The “Breakdown” section shows your Income, Expense, Assets, and Liabilities for a given month. The “Net Worth” graph shows your financial trend. “Recent Transactions” display the 10 most recent transactions, giving you an insight into how and where your money flows.

Search through transactions
Balance’s search feature makes locating transactions easy and understanding what happened. You no longer have to log in to multiple bank accounts or sift through numerous statements.

Daily digests
Balance sends you a daily digest of all the transactions synced to Balance. This helps you keep track of unexpected expenses, fees, or other fraudulent charges.

Curious about security? Read the Security Overview to understand how your data is protected at Balance.

If any of this intrigues you, get on the early-access list to receive an invite when Balance is ready.

Until next time ✌