Accounts and balances
An account in AI Money represents somewhere your money actually is: a bank account, a credit card, the cash in your wallet.
You do not have to create any. Transactions with no account attached live in a bucket called Principal, which has its own balance and behaves like a real account in almost every way. But naming your accounts is what makes automatic capture able to file things correctly.
The three types
| Type | What you enter | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Savings or debit | Bank, name, balance | A normal account |
| Credit card | Bank, name, credit limit, annual rate, current debt | Available credit, debt tracking, and a monthly payment reminder |
| Cash | Name, balance | No bank, no logo, just money |
The bank field is a picker over a catalogue of 526 banks, filtered by your country, with a search box. Choosing one fills in the name and the logo. If your institution is not there, type the name and it is saved as a manual account.
The logo is fetched once and cached. When there is none, the account gets a coloured avatar with its initial.
Balances are never stored
An account's balance is always its opening balance plus every transaction it has. Nothing is kept in a counter that could drift out of sync with your history.
This has a practical consequence worth knowing: if a balance looks wrong, the answer is always in the transactions, not in a hidden field. Something is missing, duplicated or dated differently than you think.
Reconciling with your bank
You forgot to record a purchase, and now your bank says one number and the app says another. Rather than hunting for the missing row, open the account and use Adjust balance.
- On a normal account it asks for the real balance your bank shows, and previews the difference in green or red.
- On a credit card it reasons in debt, because that is how you read a card statement. It asks for the debt your bank shows, and says whether your debt goes up or down.
- Principal can be adjusted too, which is the way to start from zero when you begin using accounts properly.
The adjustment is one row in your history, labelled as such, so the gap is explained rather than hidden. It moves the balance and it never counts as income or an expense, so one forgotten receipt cannot ruin a month of reports.
Adjustments cannot be edited, but they can be deleted, and the confirmation tells you exactly which balance the account will go back to. Deleting is the honest way to undo a mistyped adjustment: forcing a second compensating adjustment would fix the balance and leave two junk rows in your history forever.
One account, one currency
An account holds a single currency, chosen when you create it and fixed after that. A bank that gives you both a peso and a dollar account is two accounts here.
If you got the currency wrong, delete the account and create it again. The currency is fixed on purpose: changing it later would silently reinterpret every transaction in it.
Transfers between accounts
The transfer button appears once you have two or more accounts. Choose origin, destination and amount. If the currencies differ, you get a received field with the converted figure, which you can edit before saving, because the rate your bank used is the one that actually happened.
A transfer is recorded as two rows that belong together: money out of one account, money in to the other. They do not count as income or expenses, since you are exactly as rich as before, but they do move both balances.
Principal can transfer too, in both directions, which is how you tidy up money recorded before you created your accounts.
Transfers cannot be edited, only deleted and redone. Deleting one leg deletes both.
Credit cards
A credit card holds a negative balance, which is your debt. Entering your limit gives you the available figure, and entering the annual rate plus the payment day gives you a monthly reminder that includes the estimated interest for the month.
Paying the card is a transfer from the account you pay with to the card, not an expense. The expense already happened when you used the card.
Deleting an account
Deleting an account does not delete its transactions. They lose their account and fall back to Principal, so no money disappears from your history.
The opening balance of the deleted account is the exception: it stops counting anywhere, because the starting point of an account that no longer exists is not part of your net worth. The row stays visible in your ledger if you turn on Include opening balances.