Adding your first account and transactions
Do this by asking Lucius during onboarding, or by hand from the Accounts tab — both write to the same ledger. This page covers doing it by hand.
1. Add an account
Add a new account from the Accounts tab and pick a type — grouped by what they mean for your net worth, not bank marketing names:
| Group | Examples | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | Checking, Savings, Cash, E-wallet, Debit card, Money market | Money you already own and can spend now |
| Investments | Brokerage, Crypto exchange, Custody/managed | Market holdings tracked by positions — value moves daily |
| Retirement | Pension, Retirement account, Government fund | Long-term savings you can’t freely withdraw yet |
| Property & other | Real estate, Vehicle, Collectible, Owed to me, Other asset | Illiquid things you own — not live-priced |
| Credit cards | Credit card, Line of credit | Revolving credit you draw on and repay |
| Loans & mortgages | Mortgage, Personal loan, Auto loan, Student loan, Margin loan, BNPL, Other debt | Borrowed money you owe and pay back over time |
Give it a name (e.g. “Chase Checking”), a currency, and — for a credit card or loan — enter what you owe as a positive number; Open Net Worth tracks it as a liability automatically.
2. Set its starting balance
Every account has a Starting balance — what it held on the day you want tracking to begin. It isn’t a stored property; it’s a real transaction dated to a Balance as of date you pick (leave blank to start from your first real transaction). Anything dated before that day gets summarized into the opening balance instead of counted as separate activity. Open that entry later to correct the amount or date like any other transaction — except you can’t delete or merge it; see Accounts and opening balances for why.
You don’t need your balance down to the cent from years of history — most people just check today’s real balance in their bank’s app and use that as the starting point.
3. Log a transaction
Open the account’s register and add a row: date, amount, and (optionally) a payee and a category. Worth knowing before your first one:
- Category is optional. Blank shows as “Unsorted” — a real, permanent, valid state, not a placeholder to fix later. See Categories.
- A different currency is fine. Enter the amount in the account’s currency — it converts to base currency for every report automatically. See Base currency and FX.
- Moving money between two of your own accounts is a transfer, not two transactions — pick “Transfer” and the destination account so both sides of the ledger update together.
4. What happens automatically
Once an account has transactions, its balance and your net worth update immediately — no manual recalculation. Connect an AI provider and Lucius can categorize transactions, read statements, and log spending for you — but nothing requires it; entering everything by hand works the same way.
Next: see a full month
Your first month walks through what a normal month of using the app looks like once your accounts have real data in them.