Accounts: types, balances, and housekeeping

The six account types

• Checking/Current and Savings for bank accounts.
• Cash for physical money.
• Credit Card, which normally carries a negative balance.
• Loan/Mortgage, also normally negative, with optional interest automation.
• Investment, which holds securities as well as cash and shows their combined value.

The type is not cosmetic. It decides how the account is grouped, which reports treat it as debt, whether it can hold securities, and which extra fields the form offers.

Creating an account

Click Add Account on the Accounts page. The form asks for a Name, Type, Currency, an Opening Balance and a Balance Date. The last two are required and they define your starting point: the balance you enter is what the account held on that date, and every transaction from then on moves it. Starting from zero is fine; entering today's real balance and today's date is the quickest reliable start.

For credit cards and loans, a warning reminds you of the sign convention: these accounts normally hold negative balances, so a card you owe £500 on gets an opening balance of -500. Only enter a positive number if the account is genuinely in credit.

Loan extras

A loan account accepts an Interest Rate (%), an accrual basis and a repayment type. Set the rate and Endute calculates the interest portion of each repayment for you; leave it blank to enter interest manually each time. You can also define Payment extras, the recurring parts of a payment that are neither interest nor principal, such as escrow or insurance, each mapped to an expense category so repayments prefill completely.

Credit card extras

Cards accept an APR (%), a Credit Limit and an optional promotional rate with its end date. Both cards and loans can carry a minimum-payment definition: a fixed amount, a percentage of balance, or a percentage of balance plus interest. The debt payoff planner reads the rates and minimum payments directly, and the credit limit drives the utilisation display, so five minutes of setup here makes that tool considerably sharper.

Tracking-only accounts

The Tracking Only switch creates an account that watches a balance without joining your analysis: its transactions need no categories and stay out of budgets, spending reports and net worth. It is the right tool for money you want to see but not manage, and the wrong tool for anything else. Tracking accounts cannot be linked to a bank, and the switch is not a trial setting; flipping a real account to tracking pulls its history out of your reports.

The running balance column

On an account's detail page, the Running balance toggle adds a column showing your balance after each transaction, oldest at the bottom. It includes every transaction, even uncleared and future-dated ones, so the top row shows where the balance is heading once everything clears. On bank-linked accounts it is calculated from your transactions, which means it can differ from the balance your bank reports. It hides itself while a search or filter is active, and it is not available on investment accounts.

Close, archive, delete

Three different endings, for three different situations.

Closing

Closing marks an account finished on a date you choose. The date cannot be in the future or earlier than the opening balance date. All transaction history is preserved, and the dialog offers two sensible defaults: deactivate the account's scheduled transactions, and stop bank syncing if it is linked. Closed accounts move to a Closed & Archived section, and you can reactivate one at any time. One thing reactivating does not do is switch those schedules or the bank sync back on; that is deliberate, and you re-enable them yourself if you want them back.

Archiving

Archiving simply hides an account without recording an end date. Use it for clutter, closing for accounts that genuinely ended.

Deleting

Deletion is intentionally hard. An account cannot be deleted while it has any transactions, any security transactions, or a balance different from zero. In practice this means delete is for accounts created by mistake, and close is for everything else.

The grand total

The Grand Total at the bottom of the Accounts page sums your account values converted into your base reporting currency at current rates. Tracking-only accounts are excluded. For investment accounts the figure used is the total value, holdings plus cash, not just the cash balance.

What next

With accounts in place, the natural next step is connecting your banks so the transactions arrive on their own. Until those guides land, the first week guide covers the connection flow, and support covers everything else.