Guides

Short, practical guides for getting the most out of Thrift — from your first transaction to net worth over a decade. Everything runs on your device.

• Getting started Getting started What Thrift is, what happens on first launch, and how to log your first transaction — the whole loop in about two minutes.
• Voice & receipt capture Capturing Log a transaction by speaking a sentence or scanning a receipt — both read on your device, with nothing sent to a server.
• Manual entry, splits & tags Capturing Type a transaction precisely, split one purchase across categories, and tag anything for views that cut across your budget.
• Merchant rules Capturing Teach Thrift how to categorize a merchant once, and it applies that everywhere — new entries, imports, and back across your history.
• Budgets & rollover Budgeting Set one budget per category, let unspent money carry into next month, and read over-or-under straight off the figure — no badges, no nagging.
• Recurring bills & income Budgeting Set repeating transactions once — rent, subscriptions, your paycheck — and Thrift posts them on schedule so the ledger stays honest.
• Reading your Insights Insights At each month's close, Thrift writes up what happened in plain sentences — what moved, what it means, and what to do about it.
• Accounts & net worth Wealth Keep every account on one line — cash, bank, cards, assets — and watch your net worth take shape as you log.
• Investments & returns Wealth Track holdings by what actually happened to them — buys, sells, dividends — and measure the real return with XIRR, not a guessed average.
• Financial Independence Wealth Turn "someday" into a month and a year — your FI number, Coast-FI, and a projection built from your real saving and spending.
• Goals Wealth Earmark money toward what you're saving for — a trip, a deposit, an emergency fund — without moving it out of your accounts.
• Debt payoff Wealth Track what you owe and see a real payoff date — snowball or avalanche, with interest accounted for.
• Backup & restore Your data Make an encrypted backup you control — a single file only your passphrase opens — and restore it on a new phone.
• Import & export Your data Bring history in from a CSV, and export yours any time — it's your data, with no lock-in.
• Multiple currencies Your data Log in any currency and see everything in your base — using the right historical rate at the time of each transaction.
• Trash & audit log Your data Deleted a transaction by mistake? Restore it. And every change is written to a trail you can look back over.
• Settings & preferences Settings The knobs live under the More tab — your base currency, the app lock, and a demo mode for exploring safely.
• Privacy & security Privacy & security Your finances stay on your device, encrypted — no accounts, no servers, nothing to sell.
• FAQ & troubleshooting Help Quick answers — offline behavior, moving devices, and what to do when voice or receipt capture isn't cooperating.