Your first sync

Connecting a bank brings in your last 90 days — a first honest look at where the money in your care has actually been going. It arrives in two waves: your accounts and their balances appear immediately, and the transactions follow, usually within a minute or two. If the register looks empty the moment you land, that is normal — check back in a moment.

After that your banks update on their own as they report new activity, and you can still press Sync in the register or on Settings → Bank Connections any time you want to check right now.

Pending and cleared are not the same thing

A charge your bank has authorized but not settled is pending, and the register keeps those in their own section. The amount often changes when it settles — a restaurant authorizes before the tip, a fuel pump authorizes a placeholder — so a pending row is a promise, not a fact.

When the settled version arrives, it replaces the pending one rather than appearing beside it. You will not end up counting the same coffee twice.

What to do first

1. Skim the register and fix any categories that landed wrong. Each fix can become a rule — see Categories and rules.
2. Answer the Needs your review banner above the register: it asks about downloaded rows that look like ones you already entered, about money moving between your own accounts so it is not counted as spending, and about charges that look like they repeat. See Transfers between your own accounts.
3. Then build a month on the Budget tab — it proposes amounts from what you just imported.

That first sync can be a humbling read — ninety days of real history, not the version we remember. Take it as attention, not judgment: you can’t tend what you can’t see, and you’ve just turned the light on.