Tutorials & guides
Quick references for the main things you can do in Finance Helper.
Creating a list
You already have a personal list from signup — create more when you want to keep spending separate, like a household list next to a trip list. Only the person who created a list can rename or delete it; other members can add expenses but can't remove the list itself.
Inviting people to a shared list
Invite by email. If the person doesn't have an account yet, the sign-up link in their invite email drops them straight onto that list — they don't land on a generic homepage and have to go find it. People can only see a list's expenses and balance once they've accepted the invite; there's no way to browse or join a list you weren't invited to.
Splitting an expense
When you add a shared expense, the cost is split evenly across the list's members. If the total doesn't divide evenly — say $10.01 across 3 people — the leftover cent always goes to whoever created the list, not whoever paid. It's a fixed rule, not random, so the same split always resolves the same way.
Settling up
Shares are computed live from the list's expenses — nothing is ever recorded as "paid" or written to a separate payment ledger, so there's nothing to undo if you settle outside the app. Where several members owe each other in a circle, the suggested transfers are simplified down to the fewest payments that clear everyone's balance, instead of listing every pairwise debt.
Registering a card
A card is identified by its IBAN, not its label — the label (e.g. "BAC Visa") is just how it shows up to you. If a statement comes from a card you haven't registered yet, review is blocked for that whole statement until you register it — there's no way to import from an unknown card by accident.
Uploading a bank statement
Uploading the same statement twice — on purpose or by mistake — never creates duplicate expenses; re-imports are detected and skipped automatically. You can queue several files at once, and if one statement fails to parse it doesn't hold up the others. On a parse failure you get a side-by-side view of the extracted rows against the original PDF, so you can see exactly what the parser missed instead of guessing.
Reviewing imported transactions
Zero-amount rows (declined charges, holds) are filtered out automatically — you'll never see them in review. Each transaction commits the moment you assign it, so you can close the review screen partway through and pick up later without losing what you've already done. Undo only works one step back and only via the Undo button — on phone, swiping up deletes a transaction, so undo is kept as a deliberate tap to avoid reversing a commit by accident.
Creating a budget
A budget isn't tied to a single list — you can pull spending from more than one list into the same budget, for example a "Groceries" budget that spans both your personal list and a shared household list.
Attributing transactions to a budget
Transactions can land in a budget two ways: you assign one manually, or a rule you've set up (like "anything from this card") attributes it automatically. Each transaction shows a badge saying which one applied, so a rule-matched transaction never looks the same as one you picked by hand.
Reading budget progress
The progress bar changes color as you approach and then cross the cap — a budget that's merely close to its limit reads differently from one that's already over, so you can tell the two apart at a glance without reading the numbers.