User Guide

How to set Havoro up for the way you bank, and the habits that make it genuinely useful instead of another abandoned budgeting app.

ON THIS PAGE

The right order to set things up
Accounts: what to add and which type to pick
Set it up for your banking style
Importing & categorising like it's no effort
Budgeting that actually sticks
The monthly routine (20 minutes)
Getting the most out of it

1. The right order to set things up

Most people abandon budgeting apps because they start by setting a budget, guessing numbers for categories before knowing what they actually spend. Havoro's dashboard shows a Getting Started checklist that walks you through the order that works:

Add your accounts, the containers your money lives in
Import a month or two of bank CSVs, real data instead of guesses
Categorise those transactions, so you know what you actually spend
Set budgets, informed by reality so they're achievable
Plan your monthly transfers, turning the plan into concrete "move $X to Y" actions

Each step takes minutes. The whole setup is comfortably under an hour, and steps 2 and 3 get dramatically faster after the first time thanks to auto-categorisation rules.

2. Accounts: what to add and which type to pick

Add every account that either holds money you track or affects your net worth:

Account type	Use it for	Notes
Everyday / transaction	The account your card runs off	Import CSVs into this
Savings	Savings accounts, emergency funds
Offset	Accounts that offset a mortgage	Pick offset over savings when it's linked to a home loan. You can link it to the loan account
Credit card	Credit cards	Enter the current amount owing as a negative opening balance
Mortgage / liability	Home loans, car loans, personal loans	Balance is what's owing
Super	Superannuation / retirement	Update the balance at check-ins; no transaction import needed
Property	Your home, investment properties	Manual valuations; be conservative
Share portfolio	Brokerage accounts	Add holdings by ticker. Prices update automatically

Don't add accounts you'll never look at. An account you get paid into and immediately empty (a "pass-through" account) often isn't worth importing. If every dollar leaves it within days as transfers, tracking it just doubles your categorising work. Track the accounts where money lands and gets spent.

3. Set it up for your banking style

There's no single correct setup. It depends on how your money actually flows. Find yourself below.

The credit card daily driver

"Everything goes on the card, points and interest-free days included, and I pay it off in full every month."

Add the credit card with the current amount owing as a negative balance.
Import the credit card's CSV. That's where your real spending lives, so that's what gets categorised and budgeted. Groceries on the card are still Groceries.
When you pay the card from your bank account, that payment shows up in both CSVs. Mark both sides as a Transfer, since it's money moving between your own accounts, not new spending. If you categorised it as an expense, you'd double-count everything.
Your card balance in Havoro goes down when the payment lands, exactly like real life, and it's counted as a liability in your net worth, so nothing hides.

The one mistake to avoid: categorising the card repayment as an expense. The spending was already counted when each purchase hit the card. The repayment is just a transfer.

The debit-only banker

"Everything comes straight out of my everyday account. Maybe a savings account on the side."

The simplest setup: one everyday account, one savings account. Import the everyday account's CSV; that's 95% of your activity.
Moves to savings are Transfers, not expenses. Savings isn't spending, it's your money changing rooms.
If your bank pays interest, categorise it as income (there's an Interest category built in).

The bills-account system

"Pay lands in one account, then I sweep it out on payday: bills account, savings, spending, and the bills account handles every direct debit."

Add each destination account: the bills account (often an offset), savings, and whatever the daily spender is (card or debit).
This is exactly what the Transfer Planner was built for. Add each obligation (mortgage, rates quarterly, insurance annually, streaming monthly), tag it with the account it needs to land in, and it tells you the exact total to sweep to each account at the start of the month, including the monthly share of the lumpy quarterly and annual bills.
All the payday sweeps are Transfers. The real spending gets categorised where it actually happens (the direct debits in the bills account, the purchases on the card).

Couples & shared finances

"Two people, joint accounts, maybe some individual accounts too."

If you're self-hosting, Havoro is multi-user: create a login for each of you (Settings, under Users). You both see the same data, and one shared source of truth beats two spreadsheets that disagree. (The desktop app is a single local account with no login screen, so this is a self-hosted-only option.)
Start with just the joint accounts. Individual "fun money" accounts can stay untracked if you've agreed they're no-questions-asked. Track the system, not each other.
Self-host on a Pi (or any always-on machine) and you can both use it from your phones as a PWA.

4. Importing & categorising like it's no effort

Getting the file

Log in to your bank's website (not the app; the export option usually lives on the desktop site), find the transaction export, and pick CSV format. ANZ, NAB, Westpac, and CommBank exports are recognised automatically. Export a whole month or more at once; overlapping date ranges are safe, because Havoro detects and skips duplicates on import. Check the preview before confirming: dates should read as dates, descriptions as descriptions, and money coming in should be positive. That is the quickest way to spot a bank quietly changing its export format.

American Express is the exception: choose the Excel download rather than CSV. Under Statements & Activity, pick the period, then Download. The spreadsheet is the version that carries the merchant name and the category text, which is what makes Amex transactions categorise themselves; the CSV does not. Havoro will tell you if you hand it the wrong one. Check the preview shows transactions — an Amex download that covers a statement period rather than actual activity can come out with column headings and nothing underneath.

Categorising fast

The badge on the Transactions nav shows how many still need attention. Work it to zero: it's oddly satisfying.
Let the rules do the work. Built-in rules already catch supermarkets, fuel, streaming, and takeaway. When you categorise something the rules missed, accept the rule Havoro offers, since a merchant you buy from weekly should only ever be categorised by hand once.
Rules can match more than the statement line. Some banks export a tidy merchant name or their own category alongside the raw description, and a rule can match whichever of those is cleanest. A single rule mapping NAB's "Utilities" to yours beats guessing at merchant strings. Pin those rules to the account they came from, though, since banks reuse each other's words.
Fix in bulk, not one at a time. Tick a run of transactions and set the category for all of them at once. Selection survives paging, and "Select all" takes everything matching your current filters, not just what's on screen.
After two or three imports, expect 80-90% of transactions to categorise themselves. That's the point where maintaining Havoro drops to minutes.

Transfers: the concept that makes or breaks your numbers

Any money moving between your own accounts (paying the credit card, sweeping to savings, topping up the bills account) is a Transfer, not income or spending. Mark both sides. If your income or spending numbers ever look impossibly high, an unmarked transfer is almost always the culprit.

5. Budgeting that actually sticks

Budget from data, not aspiration. After a month of categorised transactions, set each category's budget at roughly what you actually spend. Get the tracking habit first; tighten later. A budget you blow through in week two teaches you nothing except to stop looking.
Turn rollover on for lumpy categories, off for steady ones. Enable "roll over unspent amount" for categories that arrive in lumps (car maintenance, gifts, clothing) so quiet months bank credit for the loud ones. Keep it off for groceries and dining out, where a fresh monthly cap is the discipline.
Big irregular bills don't belong in the monthly budget. Rates, insurance, Christmas, car rego: put them in Goals as sinking funds instead. Havoro calculates the monthly set-aside so the annual bill is boring when it arrives, and the Transfer Planner folds it into your payday sweep.
Budget your income too, not just your spending. Set what you expect each pay to be, and a month that comes in light stops looking like a month that simply hasn't been paid yet. Anything arriving that you did not expect gets listed separately, which is usually where a miscategorised transfer turns up.
Work the Unbudgeted list down. Everything you spent that no budget covers is listed there, biggest first. Each line either wants a budget (one click, prefilled with what you actually spent) or has transactions in the wrong category, and Review shows you which.
Watch "Safe to spend": what arrived, minus what your budgets still commit you to, minus spending nothing covers. It answers "can we afford to say yes to this weekend?" Budgeting something you have already paid for will not move it, because the money is only counted once.
If you are paid at the end of the month for the month ahead, Havoro already moves it. A salary landing on the 31st counts toward the next month rather than doubling up the one it arrived in. Anything shifted is marked in the transaction list, and you can move any transaction yourself with "Counts toward".

6. The monthly routine (20 minutes)

Havoro is designed around a monthly rhythm, not daily data entry:

Export & import last month's CSV from each active account (~5 min)
Categorise the stragglers the rules didn't catch (~5 min, shrinking every month)
Review the budget page. Where did last month actually go? Adjust any budget that's consistently wrong (~3 min)
Run a Check-in (Settings, then Check-in): update super, offset, and loan balances, and let it snapshot your net worth. This builds the net-worth history chart, the single most motivating graph in the app (~5 min)
Open the Transfer Planner and make the transfers it lists at your bank (~2 min)

Anchor it to payday. The routine works best as a payday ritual: money arrives, 20 minutes later everything is swept, snapshotted, and the month is set up. Couples should do it together with a coffee. It turns "we should talk about money" into a calm habit instead of an argument.

7. Getting the most out of it

Put it on your phone. If you self-host (a Raspberry Pi is plenty), open Havoro in your phone's browser and Add to Home Screen; it installs as an app. Checking "Safe to spend" from the supermarket queue is where budgets get real. (A native iPhone app is in the works.)
Check the net-worth chart when motivation dips. Budgets feel like restriction; the net-worth trend feels like progress. Same data, better story.
Don't over-categorise. Fifteen categories you'll maintain beat fifty you won't. Split a category only when you'd genuinely act differently on the two halves.
Back up before you need to, and test a restore once. Settings → Backups lets you back up with one click any time (last 30 days are kept automatically) — restore one once so future-you knows it works.
Offset users should watch the link work. Link your offset account to its loan and your check-ins capture both sides. You'll see the loan shrink while the offset grows, which is the whole strategy in one chart.
When something's missing, say so. Havoro is open source, and feature requests and bug reports genuinely shape it; new bank CSV profiles are a one-file contribution.