Frequently Asked Questions

Balans Finance is a personal finance app that helps you track your income, expenses, and transfers across all your accounts. It supports multiple currencies, hierarchical categories, budgeting, and financial analytics — all designed to give you a clear picture of your money.

You enter your transactions manually, which helps you stay mindful of every financial decision.

After signing in, the onboarding process guides you through the basics:

• Set your default currency and country
• Create your first accounts (bank, cash, or card)
• Browse the default category tree or customize it
• Start recording your transactions

Default categories are automatically created for you based on your language, so you can start right away.

Balans Finance offers a free plan with core features including accounts, transactions, categories, and basic analytics. Premium plans unlock additional features like AI-powered receipt scanning, bank statement import, and advanced financial indicators.

You can try premium features with a free trial before committing.

Balans Finance uses passwordless sign-in for your security. You can sign in by:

• Magic link — enter your email and we'll send you a one-time code to verify
• Google account — sign in instantly with your Google account

No password to remember or reset. Just your email or Google account.

Balans Finance supports five account group types to match how you organize your money:

• Cash — physical wallets and cash on hand
• Bank — debit cards, credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, and loans
• Investment — brokerage accounts and liquid investment portfolios
• Asset — property, vehicles, equipment, and other non-liquid assets
• Person — track money you've lent to or borrowed from someone

Yes. Each account has its own currency, and you can create accounts in any supported currency. When you record a transaction, it's stored in the account's currency.

For reporting and analytics, all amounts are also converted to your default currency using the exchange rate on the transaction date. This way you always see a unified picture across all your accounts.

No. An account's currency is locked when you create it. This is by design — changing the currency after the fact would require recalculating every transaction in that account, which could lead to inaccurate historical data.

If you need a different currency, create a new account and transfer any balances using the transfer feature.

Exchange rates are fetched daily from the Open Exchange Rates service and stored for each date. When you record a transaction in a non-default currency, the system automatically looks up the rate for that date to convert the amount to your default currency.

Rates are cached for performance, so lookups are fast. Historical rates are preserved, ensuring your past transactions always reflect the exchange rate that was valid at the time.

Account groups organize your accounts by type. For example, all your bank accounts (checking, savings, credit cards) live under the "Bank" group, and all your cash wallets live under "Cash."

Each group has its own type that determines how it appears in your financial overview. You can reorder accounts within groups and mark accounts as favorites for quick access.

There are three transaction types:

• Income — money coming in (salary, freelance, interest, etc.)
• Expense — money going out (groceries, rent, subscriptions, etc.)
• Transfer — money moving between your own accounts

Transfers don't affect your total net worth — they simply move money from one account to another.

A transfer moves money from a source account to a destination account. The source balance decreases and the destination balance increases.

If the two accounts are in different currencies, you enter both amounts: the amount leaving the source and the amount arriving at the destination. The system records the implied exchange rate between them.

Transfers have their own category types (like investment cashflow or financing cashflow) to help with cashflow reporting.

When you edit a transaction, all affected account balances are automatically recalculated. This includes the source account and, for transfers, the destination account.

When you delete a transaction, the account balance is adjusted as if the transaction never happened. If the transaction was part of a group (like a multi-item expense), the entire group is removed.

All changes are reflected immediately in your balances, budget tracking, and analytics.

Categories are organized in a tree structure with parent categories and subcategories. For example, "Food" might contain "Groceries" and "Restaurants" as subcategories.

Each category belongs to a type: expense, income, or transfer. You can customize the category tree — add, rename, move, or delete categories to match your personal spending patterns.

Default categories are created automatically during onboarding based on your language.

Yes. With a premium plan, you can photograph a receipt and the system will use AI to extract the store name, date, individual items, and amounts. You can then review the parsed data and create transactions from it.

Receipt scanning supports multi-item receipts, so a single photo can generate multiple categorized expense lines.

A budget lets you set spending and income targets for each category over a specific time period. When you create a budget, default lines are automatically generated based on your transaction history.

As you record transactions, the budget tracks your actual spending against your targets in real time. You can see how much you've spent, how much remains, and how you compare to past periods.

Budgets support three period types:

• Monthly — track spending month by month
• Quarterly — three-month periods for broader planning
• Yearly — annual budgets for long-term goals

Each budget line shows your target, actual amount, the difference, and historical averages from previous periods.

The average shows your typical spending in a category across past budget periods. It's a simple mean of all previous period amounts.

The trimmed average (also called truncated mean) removes unusually high and low values before calculating. It trims the top 10% and bottom 10% of data points, then averages what's left. This gives you a more realistic "normal" amount by filtering out one-off spikes or unusually low months.

For example, if you usually spend around $200 on dining but had one month at $800 (a holiday), the trimmed average would ignore that outlier and show something closer to your regular spending.

The dashboard provides several financial health indicators:

• Net Worth — total assets minus liabilities
• Net Profit Margin — what percentage of your income you keep after expenses
• Burn Rate & Runway — how fast you're spending and how long your savings will last at the current rate
• Income Stability — how consistent your income sources are over time
• Emergency Fund Coverage — how many months of expenses your liquid savings can cover

Each indicator is shown as a time series chart so you can track trends.

Balans Finance offers three main analytics views:

• Profit & Loss — income vs. expenses broken down by category, viewable as a table, pie chart, or line graph
• Balance — account balance trends over time
• Cashflow — money flowing in and out, organized by category

The dashboard also shows spending patterns by day of week and a data entry heatmap to help you stay consistent with tracking.

The trimmed average (truncated mean) works like this:

• All values from past budget periods are sorted
• The top 10% and bottom 10% of values are removed
• The remaining values are averaged

This protects against outliers. If you have 12 months of grocery spending and one month was abnormally high (holiday entertaining) and one was abnormally low (traveling), those extremes are excluded. The result better reflects your typical spending.

Every transaction is stored in its account's currency. In addition, a converted amount in your default currency is calculated and stored using the exchange rate on the transaction date.

This means all reports, budgets, and analytics can show unified totals across currencies. Historical conversions use the rate from the day the transaction occurred, not today's rate.

Each account has an initial balance (what you set when creating it) plus the sum of all transaction amounts. Income adds to the balance. Expenses subtract from it. Incoming transfers add, outgoing transfers subtract.

Balances are recalculated automatically whenever you add, edit, or delete a transaction. The system ensures your balance always reflects the current state of all your recorded transactions.

Net worth is the total of all your assets minus all your liabilities. The system groups your accounts into:

• Liquid assets — cash, checking accounts, debit cards
• Liquid investments — investment accounts, savings accounts
• Illiquid assets — property, equipment, positive person balances
• Liabilities — credit cards, loans, negative person balances

All account balances are converted to your default currency for a unified total.

Yes. Sensitive data is encrypted at the application level using Rails built-in encryption. This includes:

• Account names and descriptions
• Transaction descriptions
• Category names
• Your personal information (name, email, country)

This means even if someone accessed the database directly, they would not be able to read your personal or financial data.

No. Balans Finance does not connect to your bank accounts directly. You enter all transactions manually or by importing bank statements as files.

This approach means we never store your banking credentials and have no direct access to your bank accounts. Your login details for your bank remain private and under your control.

Only you. Your financial data is private by default. Balans Finance does not share, sell, or expose your data to third parties. Each user's data is isolated and accessible only through their authenticated session.

You can also mark individual accounts, transactions, and budget items as private for additional internal control.

Yes. In your privacy management settings, you can permanently delete all your financial data or delete your entire account. This is irreversible — once deleted, the data cannot be recovered.

We believe your data belongs to you, including the right to remove it completely.

Balans Finance is available in 11 languages: English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, and Georgian.

All categories, navigation, and interface elements are fully translated. You can switch languages at any time from the navigation bar.

An Android app is currently in development and will be available on Google Play soon. It will integrate directly with your Balans Finance account — sign in once and your data will always be in sync.

On iOS, you can use Balans Finance as a progressive web app (PWA) by adding it to your home screen from Safari. It works offline-capable and feels like a native app.

Yes. You can toggle between light and dark themes using the theme button in the navigation bar. Your preference is saved and applied automatically on your next visit.

On first visit, the app detects your operating system's theme preference and applies it automatically.

Balans Finance includes AI-powered features on premium plans:

• Receipt scanning — photograph a receipt and AI extracts items, amounts, and categories
• Bank statement import — upload a bank statement file and AI categorizes each transaction
• AI assistant — ask questions about your finances and get insights based on your actual data

AI features are designed to save time on data entry while keeping you in full control of your records.