Adding accounts and debts by hand

You don’t have to connect anything to use this app. Some of what’s been entrusted to you never touches a bank — cash in a drawer, a loan between family — and a steward’s ledger should have room for it anyway. A hand-entered account or debt behaves like any other everywhere — in your budget, in the payoff plan, on your dashboard — except that nothing arrives in it on its own.

When it is the right choice

• Cash, or an account at an institution Plaid does not support.
• A loan from a family member, which no bank knows about.
• An account you’d simply rather not connect. That’s a legitimate answer, and the app still works.

Adding one

Accounts → Add account, wherever you are starting from — a checking account, a cash wallet, a credit card or a loan all go in the same way, and the account type you pick is what decides the rest. A card or loan with a balance also shows up under Accounts → Debts, where its rate and minimum payment live. You enter it once.

What you take on

Balances only change when you change them. That’s the honest trade of doing it by hand: there’s no feed paying attention, so you’re the one who does. For a debt, that mostly means updating the balance every month or so — the payoff date is computed from it, and a stale balance quietly produces a confident, wrong date.

You can also enter individual transactions by hand. If you enter one before it clears and the downloaded copy arrives later, the two are matched rather than duplicated.