A dashboard you can rearrange, and six other things that changed in September

Most finance apps decide what you see first. Net worth up top, a chart they like, a card or two they want you to notice. In September we handed that decision to you. While we were at it we changed how accounts are arranged, how reports look before you open them and how a budget gets built. The forecast now fills itself in from your history, Scheduled Transactions tells you before a bill leaves an account short, and your investments are measured against the right line.

None of it needs setting up. Everything below is already in the web app.

Your dashboard, in your order

There is a new control beside Help in the header. It opens a list of every dashboard card. Drag them into the order you want, switch off the ones you never read, and the grid packs itself around what is left. The preview shows the result on a desktop, a tablet and a phone, because the same order collapses to two columns and then one as the screen narrows.

Thirteen new cards come with it, all switched off until you want them: spending by category, top payees, recent transactions (with the payee and category rather than the bank's garbled description), an account balance trend, a debt overview, your FIRE plan against actual, spending against last month, the spending comparison chart from the category report, savings goals, subscriptions due this month, a one-month cash flow outlook, the debt payoff chart, and a connections card that lists every bank and brokerage link with its status and consent date. The income and expense card also gained a savings rate over the last 30 days, so a pay day late in the month does not swing it.

If you never touch any of this, nothing changes. The nine cards you had are where they were. How to customise the dashboard walks through it.

Accounts arranged the way you think about them

The Accounts page used to sort alphabetically and that was that. Now you can pin accounts as favourites, which sit in their own card at the top, drag accounts into any order within a group, and drag the groups themselves. Each group is a collapsible card with its own total, and closed or archived accounts sit in a folded card of their own instead of vanishing.

A smaller thing that annoyed more people than we expected: clicking Accounts or Reports in the sidebar opened a panel that duplicated the page you had just landed on. The label now takes you to the page and a separate chevron opens the quick-navigation panel when you want it. Details are in Arranging the Accounts page.

Reports you can read before you open them

Every tile on the Reports page shows a live preview of its report: the top categories, the net worth line, the income and expense bars, the same figures the report opens with. Click anywhere on the card to open it. Your saved custom reports have their own card on the same page, so a report you set up once is one click away rather than buried in a menu.

The previews come from one cached request, so the page is no slower for showing them. The reports tour covers the twelve standard reports and the custom ones.

Budgets built from your own history

Setting a budget from a blank page is guesswork. The new planner shows one row per category with twelve months of what you actually spent as bars, a suggested amount worked out from those months (or from the scheduled transaction when there is one), and a Need or Want tag. Adjust what you disagree with, apply the plan to this month or the next twelve, and undo the lot if you change your mind. It is the kind of thing you do twice a year, so it lives on its own page rather than cluttering the monthly view.

Three smaller budgeting changes landed alongside it. Typical spend can sit beside each expense line (a toggle, off by default), so you see what a category usually costs while you edit it. Each category can carry a note for the month explaining why the amount is what it is. And the progress bars are coloured by the row's state, which reads faster than a percentage. The budgeting guide has the planner section.

A forecast that knows when your salary lands

The cash flow forecast used to move only on what you had told it: your scheduled transactions and your budget. With either one thin, the line ran flat. Now the Combined view fills the gaps from your history. Salary, rent and direct debits we found in your current accounts land on the days they usually do, and we learn what each one does when its date falls on a weekend or bank holiday (a salary paid the Friday before, a direct debit collected the Monday after). Categories you have not budgeted take what you usually spend on them.

Nothing is counted twice. A payment you have scheduled is never added again from history, and one that has stopped is left out. Usual spending needs two full months of history before it appears, and while the forecast rests mostly on less than six months it calls itself a rough guide.

On the web you can see the working. A Built from line shows the mix behind each forecast, a What this forecast assumes card lists every payment and monthly figure it used, and a Use my history switch turns the history part off if you would rather plan from schedules and budgets alone. How your history fills the gaps goes through it.

Bills your account cannot cover

A month can balance on paper and still bounce a direct debit on the 3rd. Scheduled Transactions now checks every upcoming payment against the account it comes from, projecting that account day by day from its current balance and everything you have scheduled, transfers in and out included. If the balance would go below zero on the due day, the row gets an amber Short by marker and a summary above the list counts the payments affected. Hover the marker and it tells you how much to move in, and by which day.

That is as far as it goes, by design. We record money, we never move it, so the marker is an instruction rather than a button. The transfer happens at your bank, and once the money lands the marker clears by itself.

A lighter May run short marker covers the softer case, where your schedules leave enough but your budgeted spending would not. We count that spending only against accounts we have actually seen it come out of, so a savings account that never pays for groceries is never warned about groceries. The Scheduled Transactions guide explains both markers.

Investments measured against the right line

Two changes to how the performance report tells you how you are doing. The default benchmark is now an accumulating S&P 500 fund listed in your report's currency, so dividends are inside the comparison line just as they are inside your own return. The old default tracked a dollar-listed fund's price alone, without its dividends, which made a pound portfolio look better than it was in some years and worse in others.

And dividends, interest, rebates and fees that you enter by hand on an investment account now count as return, not as money moved in or out. If you type a dividend in as income, your return goes up. If a platform fee is taken by selling a few units, your return goes down. Both are right, and neither was before. Measuring performance explains the time-weighted and money-weighted figures side by side.

What next

Most of these came from something a user asked. Keep telling us. The What's new page lists changes as they ship, and the roadmap shows what is being weighed up, with a vote on each card.

If you are not using Endute yet, the trial is 37 days with no card, and every change above is in it.