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.

Once an account is connected to your bank, we work out its opening balance from the bank's balance, so in Edit the opening balance and its date are shown but can't be changed. If the balance looks wrong, check the connection in Manage Connections, and if it still looks wrong, contact us. Cutting the connection lets you set them yourself, but stops the bank updates.

Some banks send no balance for some accounts, such as a credit card that reports only its available credit. A connected account like that keeps its opening balance and date editable until the bank starts sending a balance; from then on we work it out from that. Enter the balance at the start of the date you choose: we keep that figure and take any earlier transactions out of it, so the balance on your date stays what you entered, even when older history arrives later and has been reviewed.

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.

Arranging the page

Every group on the Accounts page is a card you can collapse from its header, which keeps the count and the group's total in your reporting currency, and Expand all sits in the page header. Drag an account by the grip at the left of its row to put it where you want it inside its group, and drag a group by the grip in its header to reorder the groups; both orders are saved to your profile, so the sidebar's accounts panel follows them. The grip works from the keyboard too: focus it, press Space, move with the arrow keys, press Space again. Accounts you never positioned keep their alphabetical place after the ones you did.

The three-dot menu on a row offers Add to favourites. Favourites gather in a card at the top of the page and at the top of the sidebar's accounts panel, and each one also keeps its place in its own group, marked with a star. Collapse every other group and the page becomes your own overview.

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: the balance leaves your net worth after the closing date, and the transactions still count in the periods they belong to. 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 card at the foot of the Accounts page, collapsed until you open it, 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 hides an account without recording an end date: its balance and transactions still count in net worth, reports and budgets, and a linked account keeps syncing, so it is current when you bring it back. The cash flow forecast is different: you can choose only active accounts for it. Use it for clutter, closing for accounts that genuinely ended. Report account filters list archived accounts after the active ones, labelled, so you can leave one out of a report deliberately.

Deleting

Deleting removes the account and everything recorded on it. An empty account goes with one confirmation. An account with history first shows you what will happen, then asks you to type its name: how many transactions go, and what changes on your other accounts. Delete is for duplicates, accounts created by mistake, and starting over; close is for accounts that ended.

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.