Most "get started" pages are six bullet points and a happy graphic. This one isn't. It's a Saturday-morning walkthrough — fifteen minutes of setup, a week of small habits, and the five mistakes that quietly waste people's first month. Read it in order. Skip nothing.
Most users who get the most out of FinTrack do these five things in their first hour. Everything else in this guide is detail — these five are non-negotiable.
Open FinTrack, work top to bottom. By the end of this section you'll have a working dashboard, three budgets, your paycheck on file, and 90 days of imported history.
~15 minutes if you have your bank's CSV readyNo credit card is needed for the 14-day trial. Use the email you actually read — the one reminder email on day 12 of your trial goes there.
Landing page → Start Your Free TrialSet this once and the entire app — every screen, every AI answer, every email — uses it. Switching later works but reformats your historical totals, so get it right now.
Settings → Preferences → CurrencyThis is the single most important thing you'll do in this guide. Without historical data, the AI has nothing to read, the budget suggestions can't compute, and the forecast can't project. Even if you only have one bank, even if it feels tedious — do it now.
Transactions → Import CSV → drag & dropFinTrack needs to know when your paycheck lands to forecast your balance. Add it once with the cadence (monthly, biweekly, every Friday) and amount. Same for rent, utilities, and any subscriptions you already know about.
Recurring Payments → + Add → IncomeThe temptation on day one is to set a budget for every category. Don't. Three budgets you can actually pay attention to beat ten you'll ignore by Friday. Pick your three biggest discretionary spend categories — typically Groceries, Dining, and Subscriptions.
Budgets → tap a suggestion chip → adjust → SaveDon't ease in with "what can you do?" — ask the actual money question you've been mulling over. "Can I afford a $400 flight on the 28th?" or "Where did $300 go last weekend?" If you imported history in step 3, the answer will be specific to your numbers.
Sidebar → Money Coach → type a questionSetup is done. Now the small habits that make it pay off. None of these take more than two minutes. None of them require willpower. They just need to happen.
Three cards land on your dashboard at 6 AM your time. Skim them while the coffee brews. Dismiss any that don't apply. The whole thing takes 20 seconds.
Type the purchase as a question. "Should I get the $89 jacket?" The verdict pill is your gut check. If it says "wait," it usually means wait.
Paper receipts in your pocket are tomorrow's mystery transactions. Open FinTrack on your phone, tap the floating "+", point your camera. Done in 15 seconds.
The Detected Subscriptions card on the Recurring page is your kill list. Cancel one a week. Over a year that's 50 leaks closed.
Open the Cash Flow Forecast card. Note the lowest point in the next 30 days. If it's a number that worries you, deal with it on Monday, not on the 28th.
Six pages. That's the whole app. Memorize what each one does and you'll never feel lost.
Your morning glance. Daily Insights, Cash Flow Forecast, Quick Actions (Add Transaction, Scan Receipt, Import CSV), and the monthly Income vs. Expenses chart. If you only open one page a day, this is it.
Every transaction in one searchable list. Add manually, import CSV, or scan a receipt via the floating "+". Filter by category, date range, or merchant. The page you visit when "where did that go?" hits.
Your monthly caps and the yellow projection line on each bar that predicts the day you'll go over. AI suggestion chips appear after 30 days of history. The page that turns "I'm doing fine" into a number.
Your subscriptions and bills. Manually-added ones at the top, FinTrack-detected ones in their own card below. The page where the silent four-figure annual leaks live.
Ask any money question. Each answer starts with a Yes/Wait/No verdict pill and cites your actual numbers from the last 90 days. History collapses below so you can revisit past answers.
Currency, language, billing, account, export. The CSV export button lives here — pull a full backup any time. The "delete everything" button does too. Both are one click, both are honest.
None of these are buried — they're all one click from where you already are. But almost nobody finds them in their first month. So.
Below the Cash Flow Forecast, the What If? button takes a hypothetical amount and re-runs the 30-day projection. Yes/Wait/No verdict, plus the lowest your balance gets. Two-second sanity check.
If you have 6 or 12 months of bank statements lying around, drop them in. FinTrack dedupes by date+amount, so re-importing is safe. More history = sharper Money Coach.
On iOS Safari, tap Share → Add to Home Screen. Now Money Coach is two taps away from your lock screen. Use it like a calculator that has opinions.
The defaults are decent. Yours will be better. Settings → Categories → rename, recolor, or invent new ones. Existing transactions update everywhere automatically.
Settings → Export → Download all transactions. Stash it in iCloud Drive or Google Drive. Your data, even if FinTrack disappears tomorrow. (We won't. But still.)
The scanner is gold for restaurants, groceries, and gas pumps. For a $3.40 espresso, typing the amount manually is faster than waiting for vision OCR. Use the right tool.
We've watched a lot of new accounts. These five patterns are the ones we see most often — and they all cost real value. The good news: the fix for each is one sentence.
You sign up and want to "try it clean." But Money Coach with no data is a chatbot that knows nothing about you. Daily Insights are quiet. Forecasts are flat.
Enthusiasm budget. By Friday you'll be ignoring nine of them. Once you ignore one, you ignore all of them, and Budgets becomes a dead page.
They're not alarms. They're notes from a friend who's seen your activity. If you panic at every yellow card, you'll stop opening the dashboard within a week.
People love the AI and the budgets. They forget the Subscription Detector. Meanwhile a free trial from January is still charging $14.99 every month and the answer to "where did $300/mo go?" is sitting there waiting to be cancelled.
"Tell me about my spending" gets a fuzzy paragraph. "How am I doing this month?" gets a polite hedge.
You can do everything else right — budgets, history import, daily glance — and the Cash Flow Forecast will still look catastrophic because there's no income line. People panic and bounce.
Here's the honest check-in. If your account looks like this at day 30, FinTrack is working as intended and the $4.99 is paying for itself. If something on this list isn't true yet, scroll back to the relevant section — chances are you skipped a step.
Day 30 is when several features that need a 30-day data window quietly turn on — budget suggestions, sharper forecasts, subscription detection. It's a real threshold, not a marketing number.
Three real places to get unstuck. We answer everything personally for the first year — there's no "tier 2 support" because there's no tier 2.
help@fintrack.app — replies usually within 12 hours, faster during weekdays. Tell us what you tried, paste a screenshot if you can.
Searchable articles for every feature on this guide. Linked from the bottom-right of every page in the app once you're signed in.
Yes, really. Money Coach handles meta questions too. "How do I export my CSV?" — it'll tell you the exact path.
Start the trial, follow this guide top to bottom, and by the time the weekend ends you'll have done everything that matters. Then it's just two minutes a day.
Free for 14 days · Cancel anytime · Just $4.99/mo after