Question 1

What is CoinSprout?

Accepted Answer

CoinSprout is a personal finance tracker for individuals and couples. You upload bank statements or enter transactions by hand, and the app shows you spending, budgets, goals, and net worth — all wrapped in a warm garden metaphor so checking in feels like tending to something alive, not auditing a spreadsheet.

Question 2

How do I add my first account?

Accepted Answer

Head to Money Pots and press Add account. Give it a name, a starting balance, and the date that balance was correct. Every transaction after that date is added to the starting balance to compute the current total.

Question 3

Do I have to upload statements?

Accepted Answer

No. You can add transactions manually on the Transactions page. Uploading statements is just faster when you have many.

Question 4

What statement formats are supported?

Accepted Answer

CSV, TSV, PDF, and images (PNG, JPG). PDFs and images are parsed by an AI pipeline — it’s best on clear, monochrome statements. Each upload is capped at 500 transactions.

Question 5

Why is my income positive and my expenses negative?

Accepted Answer

CoinSprout stores each transaction with a signed amount: income is positive, expenses are negative. The app formats them with colour and labels on screen, but the underlying data uses this convention everywhere so the math stays consistent.

Question 6

What is a split expense?

Accepted Answer

A split expense is one you paid on behalf of a group — dinner for four, a shared Airbnb, a joint gift. You mark the transaction as split and tell CoinSprout how many people it was for. When friends pay you back, you log their reimbursements as separate income transactions linked to the original expense.Reports, budgets, and stats automatically show your net cost (the gross expense minus what came back), so splitting doesn’t inflate your expenses.

Question 7

What's the difference between a transfer and a transaction?

Accepted Answer

A transfer moves money between two of your own accounts — it isn’t income or an expense. CoinSprout can auto-detect transfers during statement upload, or you can mark any transaction as a transfer yourself. Transfers are excluded from reports and budgets so moving money around doesn’t distort your story.

Question 8

Can I delete a transaction after saving it?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Open the transaction to see its detail modal, or use the delete button on the list. If you delete a split parent, its reimbursements are also removed so you don’t end up with phantom income.

Question 9

How do recurring transactions work?

Accepted Answer

On the Recurring page you can set up templates that auto-post on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly cadence — rent, salary, subscriptions, that kind of thing. A Convex cron fires each day and creates the next transaction when the schedule says it’s due. You can pause, edit, or delete a template at any time, and short months (February) are handled safely so a “31st of the month” template doesn’t skip.

Question 10

Can I attach a receipt to a transaction?

Accepted Answer

Yes — open a transaction and upload an image (PNG / JPG) from the receipt card. The file lives in your Convex storage and is shown in the transaction detail modal. Removing the receipt deletes the stored image too, so you’re not paying for orphaned files.

Question 11

What if my accounts are in different currencies?

Accepted Answer

Each account has its own currency. Per-account views render in the native currency, but anywhere CoinSprout needs to sum across accounts (dashboard net balance, reports, budgets, net worth) it converts into your display currency using the FX rates you manage on the Rules page.When a conversion has to fall back on a missing rate, the total gets a subtle “~ approx” badge so you know it’s a best-effort number, not gospel. Add the missing pair on the Rules page to make the badge go away.

Question 12

How do monthly budgets work?

Accepted Answer

A budget is a monthly spending cap per category. As transactions come in, CoinSprout sums expenses in that category for the current month and shows a progress ring. The health emoji tells you at a glance: 🌿 thriving, 🌱 growing, 🍂 needs attention, 🥀 over.

Question 13

What does the savings goal pace mean?

Accepted Answer

If you set a target date on a goal, CoinSprout works out the monthly amount you’d need to save to get there on time. It then compares that to your average monthly savings and tells you whether you’re on track, behind pace, or ahead.

Question 14

How is the savings rate calculated?

Accepted Answer

Savings rate is net savings ÷ income for the selected period. Net savings is income minus expenses, with split expenses counted at their net cost. A healthy garden keeps 20%+.

Question 15

What does the Net Worth tracker show?

Accepted Answer

The Net Worth page builds a month-by-month history of your total net worth by replaying every transaction against each account’s starting balance. You can stack-break it by account, switch between 6M / 1Y / All ranges, and watch your progress against the garden milestones (First Sprout → Mighty Oak).Historic months are priced at today’s FX rates when accounts live in different currencies — the shape of the curve is honest, but the exact figures for old months are an approximation.

Question 16

How do I invite my partner?

Accepted Answer

On the Garden Partners page, the household owner can generate an invite code. Share it with your partner — they sign in and paste the code on the join page. Codes expire after 7 days.

Question 17

Can my partner see my personal accounts?

Accepted Answer

No. Accounts are either personal (only you can see them) or joint (linked to a household, both members see them). When you create an account you choose which one it is.

Question 18

What happens if I leave a household?

Accepted Answer

Your personal accounts stay with you. Joint accounts and any shared budgets or goals stay with the household — they don’t disappear. You can be re-invited later if you change your mind.

Question 19

What's the household activity feed?

Accepted Answer

The Garden Partners page shows a warm activity feed: who joined, who left, which joint accounts, budgets, and goals were planted, which goals bloomed, and any unusually large transactions. It’s an append-only audit trail so nobody has to wonder “who changed what?” The feed is household-scoped — your personal moves stay private.

Question 20

How accurate is AI categorization?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the statement — typed CSVs are near-perfect, while scanned PDFs with unusual layouts can slip. You can always review the parsed transactions before saving, and any category you change later feeds back into the system (see the Rules & smart categorization section).For every row, the parser also estimates its own confidence. Rows it’s unsure about get a warm “double-check” badge in the review screen so you know where to slow down.

Question 21

What does the 'double-check' badge mean?

Accepted Answer

When the parser isn’t confident about a row’s category — usually because the description is cryptic or the merchant doesn’t fit any obvious category — it flags the row with a warm “double-check” pill in the review screen. You can filter the review table to just those rows with the “Review N to double-check” toggle, fix the categories, then commit. Nothing is ever saved before you press the button.

Question 22

Can I re-upload a statement without creating duplicates?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The upload modal flags transactions that look like duplicates of existing ones (same date, amount, and description prefix) so you can uncheck them before committing.

Question 23

Are my statements sent somewhere?

Accepted Answer

Statements are uploaded to your Convex instance and processed by the AI pipeline. They’re used only for parsing — not training — and you can delete them from your account at any time.

Question 24

What are transaction rules?

Accepted Answer

A rule is a pattern that auto-assigns a category to matching transactions — for example, “every description containing NETFLIX goes to Entertainment.” Rules are scoped to your household, evaluated in priority order, and live on the Rules page where you can create them by hand.

Question 25

When does a rule fire?

Accepted Answer

Rules fire automatically whenever a new transaction is created without an explicit category — statement uploads, recurring templates, and fresh manual entries. If the caller already picked a category, rules stay out of the way so your choice always wins.

Question 26

What's the 'Save as a rule?' prompt when I edit a transaction?

Accepted Answer

If you change the category on a transaction that was auto-assigned (by the AI parser or by an existing rule), CoinSprout asks whether you’d like to remember the correction as a rule. It prefills the match against the transaction’s description so you don’t have to think about regex or priority.Leave “Also recategorize past matches” checked and the same rule is applied backwards through your history, so one correction fixes every similar transaction in one go. If a rule already matches this description, the prompt offers to update that rule instead of creating a duplicate.

Question 27

Can I apply a new rule to transactions I already imported?

Accepted Answer

Yes. On the Rules page each rule has an “Apply to past” action that scans every accessible account and recategorizes matches. The teach prompt on the edit modal does the same thing with one click when the rule is freshly saved.

Question 28

What match types are available?

Accepted Answer

Contains (description includes this text), Starts with, Exact, and Regex. You can also match on amount instead of description. Regex is validated at save time so a bad pattern won’t break matching later.

Question 29

What are the most useful shortcuts?

Accepted Answer

N — new transactionU — upload statement/ — global search? — open the full shortcuts paletteG then D/ T / R — jump to Dashboard, Transactions, Reports

Question 30

My balance looks wrong

Accepted Answer

Check the account’s starting balance and date under Money Pots. The balance is computed from that anchor plus every transaction after it. If you edited a starting balance but didn’t change its date, try re-saving the account.

Question 31

A reimbursement shows up as income

Accepted Answer

Reimbursements on a split expense should be linked to the parent transaction. If one got disconnected, open the transaction and relink it from the detail modal. Unlinked reimbursements count as income everywhere.

Question 32

The app feels slow after a large import

Accepted Answer

Try narrowing the date range on the Transactions and Reports pages — Convex queries scale with the number of rows in the window, not the table, so a smaller window is much faster.

Everything about growing money, answered.

Getting started

Accounts & transactions

Budgets & goals

Households

AI statement parsing

Rules & smart categorization

Keyboard shortcuts

Troubleshooting