Finance

What the Finance tab is for

Time tracking tells the assistant what you earned. Finance tells it what you actually have. Import a bank statement and Really Focus builds a real picture of your money — balances, where it's going, and whether you're on track for the targets you've set — then folds that into every briefing.

It handles personal and business in one place. Each account you add is tagged Business or Personal, and a toggle at the top of the dashboard filters the whole view to one or the other (or shows everything together).

The Finance tab

Open Finance from the side navigation. The dashboard shows the current month and is built around the Business / Personal / All toggle:

• Per-currency totals — one card per currency with Balance, money In, money Out, and Net for the month.
• Account balances — a card per financial account with its current balance, context badge, and institution.
• Spend by category — a ranked bar list of where the money went this month, per currency.
• Money goals — progress bars for any goal with a financial target (see below), green when on track, red when behind.

Add a financial account

1. Click Add account. Fill in:

   • Name — whatever you'll recognise. "Business Current", "Monzo Personal".
   • Context — Business or Personal. This drives the dashboard toggle and helps the assistant categorise.
   • Type — Checking, Savings, Credit card, Cash, Loan, or Investment.
   • Institution (optional) — Monzo, Chase, Amex… Used to remember your CSV column layout for next time.
   • Currency — the account's three-letter code (USD, GBP, EUR…).

2. Save. The account appears on the dashboard at a zero balance, ready for its first import.

Import a bank statement

Really Focus reads two export formats, both straight out of online banking:

• CSV — what nearly every bank exports. Because every bank lays its columns out differently, you map them once and Really Focus remembers the layout per institution.
• OFX / QFX — the structured format used by Quicken and many banks. No mapping needed — the fields are already labelled.

Open Import from the Finance tab (or visit /finance/import). The wizard walks through four stages:

1. Upload. Pick the financial account the statement belongs to, choose the file (.csv, .ofx, or .qfx, up to 5 MB), and upload. The format is detected from the file extension.

2. Map columns (CSV only). Tell Really Focus which column is the date, the amount, and the description, plus the amount style:

   • Signed (− = out) — one amount column where money out is negative.
   • Signed, flipped — same, but your bank writes spend as positive.
   • Separate in/out columns — debits and credits in two columns.
   • DR/CR indicator column — one amount plus a separate column marking debit or credit.

   Set the date format if auto-detection needs a hint (d/m/Y, Y-m-d…), then Refresh preview.

3. Preview. Check the parsed rows — date, description, and a signed amount (red out, green in). If anything looks off, adjust the mapping and refresh until it's right.

4. Import. Confirm. The job parses the file, de-duplicates against what's already there, and categorises every new transaction. A spinner shows progress; when it finishes you get a count of rows Found, Imported, and Skipped (dupes).

No double-imports

Re-importing a statement you've already loaded is safe. Really Focus fingerprints each transaction — by its OFX identifier where one exists, otherwise by date, amount, description, and account — and skips anything it's already seen. Overlap a month between two exports and the duplicates simply land in the Skipped count.

Automatic categorisation

As transactions import, the assistant sorts each one into a category — using the description and the account's business/personal context to steer the call. The category set is fixed so spend reports stay consistent:

• Income, Transfer
• Software, Subscriptions, Equipment, Office
• Professional services, Marketing, Travel, Meals
• Taxes, Bank fees, Insurance, Utilities, Rent
• Groceries, Health, Education, Entertainment
• Uncategorized — the fallback when nothing fits cleanly.

The Transactions view

Click Transactions from the Finance tab for the full ledger. Filter by account, by category, or flip on Uncategorized to find everything still needing a human eye. From the table you can:

• Re-categorise inline — change any row's category from the dropdown; the balance and reports update.
• Add a transaction by hand — for cash or anything not on a statement. Pick the account, date, Money out or Money in, amount, optional category, and a description.
• Delete — remove a row; the account balance recalculates immediately.

Money goals

Finance plugs straight into Goals. Any goal can carry a financial target, and Really Focus measures progress against your real transactions instead of asking you to update a number by hand.

When you create or edit a goal, give it a target amount, a currency, and a direction:

• Revenue or Savings — counts money in. "Hit £200k revenue by December."
• Budget — counts money out as a ceiling. "Keep software spend under $500 this month."

Link the goal to specific financial accounts to scope it to just those, or leave it open to count every account in the chosen context. Progress shows on the Finance dashboard as a percentage with an on-track / behind read, and the assistant references it in your briefings. You can set all of this from the Goals page, or just ask the assistant: "Set a goal to bank £200k revenue this year and track it against my business account."

Finance in your briefings

Once there's data to read, your money becomes part of the assistant's weekly reasoning — and it speaks up when something needs attention:

• Low balance — an account running low or negative against its typical monthly spend gets flagged as a runway risk.
• Overspend vs typical — a sharp jump in a month's spend (versus the previous 30 days) is called out, with the categories driving it.
• Goal off-track — a money goal that's slipping behind pace shows up in the weekly review with the gap to target.

Manage it from anywhere

The assistant has full read-and-write control over your finances on every channel. From Telegram or any chat:

• "What's my business balance right now?"
• "How much did I spend on software this month?"
• "Log a £40 cash expense for client lunch, business."
• "Re-categorise the Stripe payout as income."
• "Am I on track for the £200k revenue goal?"

Importing a statement is the one finance task that stays in the app — file uploads need the browser. Everything else, you can do by asking.

Tips

• Set the institution on each account. It's what makes CSV column-mapping a one-time chore instead of a monthly one.
• Sweep the Uncategorized filter after each import. A two-minute pass keeps your spend reports — and the assistant's read on them — honest.
• Keep one account per real-world account. Don't merge a card and a current account into one; separate accounts keep balances and dupe-detection accurate.
• Tag context deliberately. Business vs Personal is what powers the toggle and sharpens categorisation — get it right when you add the account.

What's next

• Goals — attach a financial target so progress tracks your real money.
• Time tracking — pair earned revenue with banked revenue for the full picture.
• Billing integrations — connect Xero or FreeAgent for invoice-level detail alongside your bank data.
• Back to Getting started