Standalone Finance Management
User Guide

Standalone Finance Management is a personal money tracker that connects to your bank so you can:

• See every account balance in one place — even if your money sits in EUR, HUF, USD, or GBP.
• Watch your subscriptions, salary, and recurring bills get spotted automatically.
• Get a forecast of where your balance will be 30 days from now.
• Add your loans and mortgages so you know what's owed and when.
• Import old transactions from a spreadsheet (CSV file) if your bank doesn't connect.

The big thing that makes it different from most finance apps: your data lives on your phone, not on someone else's server. More on that in the Privacy section.

Three things to do the first time you open the app:

1. Unlock with your fingerprint or face. The very first time you open Standalone Finance Management after installing it, your phone asks you to confirm with Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint, or whatever your phone uses. From then on, every time you open the app it asks again. If you can't unlock your phone, you can't open the app. That's the whole "lock".

2. Pick your base currency. Tap the Settings tab at the bottom. Choose EUR, HUF, USD, or GBP. The app uses this to add up balances across all your accounts on the Dashboard. You can change it any time.

3. Connect a bank (or add accounts manually). In Settings, tap Connect under "Bank Connection". This opens a secure window from your bank, where you sign in to authorise Standalone Finance Management to read your accounts and transactions. We'll cover this in detail below.

That's it. From here on, the app is yours.

The first thing you see after unlocking. Top to bottom:

Net Position card

A big number showing all your cash minus all your tracked debt, in your base currency. The line under it spells out the split, e.g.:

There are two buttons under the number:

• Add account — for cash, savings, or any account you don't connect through a bank (e.g. an envelope of cash, a brokerage you want to track manually).
• (more controls become available as you connect accounts)

Currency exposure

If you have money in more than one currency, you'll see a small bar chart-style breakdown. It tells you, for example, that 70% of your cash is in EUR and 30% in HUF. Useful if you travel or earn in multiple currencies.

Accounts

Each connected or manual account gets a row showing its current balance and last-synced timestamp. Tap a row to edit the account (name, type, currency, balance for manual accounts).

Income streams

When the app sees the same employer pay you a similar amount on a regular schedule — usually monthly — it lists them here as a recurring income stream with a confidence label:

• High confidence — three or more payments at a steady rhythm.
• Medium confidence — only two so far, but they look regular.

You'll see the average monthly income at the top of the card. The forecast uses this number.

Expense profile

Same idea, but for spending categories. If you've been spending around €450/month on groceries for three months, that becomes one Food profile with a high-confidence tag. Categories that only appear in a single month don't make it onto this card — the app waits for evidence before claiming something is recurring.

Balance forecast

A 30-day projection of your base-currency balance. The line:

• starts at today's total cash,
• subtracts each upcoming recurring expense or loan payment on its expected date,
• adds each expected income deposit,
• ends 30 days from now.

The forecast is a what-if, not a guarantee. It uses what the app has seen so far. New subscriptions or one-off expenses won't appear in the line.

Bank connection happens through Tink, an EU-licensed bank-aggregation service used by many large banks for open banking. Standalone Finance Management never sees your bank login.

How the flow works (from your point of view)

1. In Settings, tap Connect under "Bank Connection".
2. A web window opens, run by Tink. Pick your bank from the list.
3. Sign in to your bank with your usual credentials (in the sandbox version, you'll see "UK Demo Bank" — use the test sign-in shown on screen).
4. Approve the consent — usually a checkbox that says "Allow Standalone Finance Management to read your accounts and transactions for the next 90 days."
5. Your phone receives the result through a secure return link (a Universal Link on iOS, an App Link on Android — both tied to finance.appointer.hu and verified by the operating system, so no other app can intercept it). The web window closes and you're back in Standalone Finance Management. A "Sandbox token stored at HH:MM" chip appears at the top of the Bank Connection card.
6. The first sync runs automatically: you'll see "Synced to SQLite — 1 account, 100 transactions" or similar.

The five buttons under Bank Connection

After you're connected, the card shows five buttons:

• Reconnect — opens the same flow again. Use this if your bank says your consent expired (usually after 90 days) or if you accidentally disconnected.
• Sync — pulls the latest accounts and transactions from the bank. Standalone Finance Management does this automatically when needed, but you can force a sync any time you want fresh data.
• Refresh token — quietly renews the permission to talk to your bank, without you signing in again. The app does this in the background for you. You'd only tap this manually if something looks stuck.
• Status — re-reads what's stored on your phone (when your access expires, what bank you're connected to, etc.). Useful for debugging.
• Disconnect — wipes the bank credentials from your phone. The bank transactions already imported stay in your ledger.

What countries / banks work

Today, the sandbox uses a UK Demo Bank that returns GBP transactions for testing. When Standalone Finance Management goes live, you'll be able to pick from any bank Tink supports across the EU + UK — that's hundreds of banks.

Currencies the app can handle

Right now: EUR, HUF, USD, GBP. Accounts and transactions in other currencies (SEK, NOK, DKK, CHF, …) are silently skipped during sync — the app doesn't yet know how to convert them. Support for more currencies will arrive in a future update.

Tap the Ledger tab at the bottom. This is your full transaction history.

What you see

Each row is one transaction: the merchant, category, date, and amount. Income shows in green, expenses in red, debt payments in a separate colour.

The search bar at the top filters by merchant, category, or description. The four chips below it (All / Income / Expense / Debt) filter by type.

Adding a manual transaction

Tap the + button. A form opens:

• Account — which of your accounts the transaction came from / went to.
• Amount — a positive number. The "Type" chip decides whether it's added or subtracted from your account.
• Type — Income, Expense, Transfer, Loan payment, Mortgage payment, Fee, Refund. Pick what fits.
• Date — when it happened.
• Description / Merchant — what shows in the row.
• Category — one of your categories (managed in Settings → Categories).
• Recurring — tick this if it's something that happens regularly. The app will use this hint when looking for subscriptions.

Hit Save. The transaction appears in the list immediately, and your account balance updates.

Editing a transaction

Tap any row. The edit panel opens. You can change:

• Category and type.
• Merchant or description (rename "AMZN PMT" → "Amazon" so future imports match).
• A note (free text, for your eyes only).
• Recurring flag — manually mark something as recurring or unmark it.
• Exclude from reports — if a transaction shouldn't count toward income/expense totals (e.g. you transferred money between your own accounts), tick this.
• Transfer match — if this transaction is the other half of a transfer (e.g. €500 out of Checking, €500 into Savings), pick the matching transaction. Both get flagged as transfers and stop polluting your income/expense numbers.

Importing from a CSV file

If your bank gives you a CSV export, you can pull old transactions in:

1. Tap the Import CSV button on the Ledger screen.
2. Pick the file from your phone.
3. Map columns: the app guesses which CSV column is "date", which is "amount", etc., but you can correct it.
4. Pick the date format if the app doesn't auto-detect it.
5. Pick which account these transactions belong to.
6. Confirm. The app de-duplicates against transactions you already have, so re-importing the same file is safe.

You can later revert a batch by tapping the import batch in the list — useful if you made a mistake.

Recurring suggestions

At the top of the Ledger you might see a "Spotted recurring" card. The app has noticed three transactions that look like the same subscription. Tap Confirm to formally tag the group as recurring (so it shows up in the Dashboard cards), or Dismiss if it's a false positive.

Tap the Debts tab. This is for things your bank doesn't surface well: mortgages, personal loans, student loans, car finance.

Adding a debt

Tap +. The form asks for:

• Name — e.g. "Mortgage", "Car loan".
• Institution — who you owe (your bank, the dealership, etc.).
• Type — Mortgage / Personal loan / Auto loan / Student loan / Other.
• Currency — usually the same as the bank account paying it.
• Original principal — what you borrowed.
• Outstanding balance — what's left.
• Interest rate — annual percentage (e.g. 4.5 for 4.5%).
• Payment amount — how much you pay each month.
• Next due date — when the next payment hits.
• Rate type — Fixed / Variable.

Once saved, the outstanding balance counts toward the debt half of your Dashboard's Net Position. The payment amount and due date feed the balance forecast as a scheduled outflow.

Updating progress

When you make a payment, edit the debt and lower the outstanding balance manually. (A future version will offer to match a payment from your transactions automatically.)

Categories are how the app groups your spending. The defaults are:

When you connect a bank, Standalone Finance Management maps the bank's own categories onto these. Anything it can't map confidently lands in Other.

Adding your own

In Settings → Categories, type a new name in the box and tap Add. New categories show up in the dropdown when you edit a transaction.

You can archive categories you don't want (tap the x on the chip), but the defaults can't be removed — only hidden.

The Settings tab gathers everything that isn't day-to-day.

Base currency

EUR / HUF / USD / GBP. The Dashboard, summaries, and forecasts use this. Changing it doesn't convert anything — every transaction stays in its native currency. The base is just the lens through which totals are computed.

Locale

Affects how numbers and dates are displayed. Examples:

• en-US → 1,234.56 · May 12, 2026
• en-GB → 1,234.56 · 12 May 2026
• hu-HU → 1 234,56 · 2026. máj. 12.

If you type an invalid locale, the field flags it in red.

Bank Connection

See Connecting Your Bank above.

Categories

See Categories above.

Backup & restore

Make and restore encrypted backup files. The export button asks you to choose a passphrase, generates a .sfmbak file in memory, and hands it to your phone's share sheet so you can save it wherever you like (iCloud Drive, Google Drive, email, AirDrop). The restore button — visible on a fresh install before you've connected a bank — picks a .sfmbak file, asks for the passphrase, decrypts it, and rebuilds your data.

See What if I lose my phone? for the full walk-through and the important "we cannot recover your passphrase" warning.

This is the single most important thing to understand about Standalone Finance Management, and it's also the simplest:

• The list of your accounts, every transaction, your categories, your debts, your detected subscriptions, your forecasts — all of it lives in a file on your phone. We don't have a copy. There's no Standalone Finance Management "account" or "server" you sign into. There's only your phone.
• The only place anything we run touches your bank data is a tiny bridge (a small server we run, hosted on Cloudflare). The bridge's only job is to pass messages back and forth between your phone and your bank during the authorisation step. The bridge stores nothing — your tokens and your transactions travel through it for milliseconds and are forgotten.
• Your bank login goes to your bank, not us. The whole point of using Tink is that we never see your password.
• The lock on the front of the app is your phone's own biometric system. We don't have your fingerprint or your face data — only your phone does.

What this means practically

• If you lose your phone, your bank data is gone — unless you've made an encrypted backup. (See What if I lose my phone? below.)
• You can't share your finances across two phones. (Multi-device support is a future feature; the encrypted backup file is the closest thing to "moving to a new phone" today.)
• You don't need to "delete your account" if you stop using the app — just uninstall it. There's no account to delete.
• We don't send your data to advertisers or analytics services. There's no data to send.
• We don't use third-party crash reporting (no Sentry, no Crashlytics). If the app crashes, the crash log stays on your device.

Two ways data gets refreshed:

Automatic background refresh

Banks issue access tokens that expire after about two hours. Standalone Finance Management quietly renews yours about a minute before it expires, so you never have to sign in to your bank again until the longer-term consent runs out (typically every 90 days).

This refresh happens silently in the background while the app is open, and again every time you bring the app back to the foreground.

Manual sync

Tap Sync in Settings to immediately pull the latest accounts and transactions from your bank. The Dashboard refreshes when the sync finishes.

"Bank connection action failed"

Open Settings and look at the detail line under "Bank Connection" — it will show the underlying reason. Common causes:

• No internet. Reconnect to Wi-Fi or cellular.
• Consent expired. Tap Reconnect and sign in to your bank again.
• Token rejected. Tap Disconnect then Connect to start the consent flow fresh.

Dashboard cards are empty after a successful sync

If Settings shows "1 account, 100 transactions imported" but the Dashboard income/expense/forecast cards are blank:

• Income streams — needs at least two paydays from the same employer to detect a stream. After your second pay, it should appear.
• Expense profile — needs at least two months of activity in a category. Common first-week-of-use behaviour.
• Forecast — if you have no detected income streams or recurring expenses yet, the forecast is just a flat line at your current balance. That's correct.

"0 transactions imported, skipReasons: unsupported_currency:SEK (N)"

Standalone Finance Management only handles EUR / HUF / USD / GBP today. Accounts in other currencies (Swedish krona, Swiss franc, etc.) get filtered. Workaround: reconnect using a supported-currency account at the same bank.

App stuck on the lock screen

Tap Unlock again. If your phone's biometric is failing (wet fingers, mask on for Face ID), use the device passcode fallback the phone offers after a couple of biometric failures.

Sync is slow

The first sync after connecting can take 15–30 seconds depending on how many transactions the bank returns (Standalone Finance Management pulls up to two years of history). Subsequent syncs are much faster — usually under 5 seconds.

A transaction looks miscategorised

Tap it. Change the category. The next time the bank sends a similar transaction, Standalone Finance Management still maps it from the bank's category, not yours — but you can rename the merchant under "Merchant" so future ones look right.

Is my bank login safe?

Yes. Your bank login never reaches Standalone Finance Management. When you tap Connect, the window that asks for your username and password is hosted by Tink (or, more precisely, redirected to your bank's own login page). We only receive a temporary token that says "this user has allowed Standalone Finance Management to read transactions" — never your credentials.

Can I use this with my real bank yet?

In the current version, only the sandbox (Tink's practice bank). When Tink approves the production application, you'll be able to pick from any bank in their network. This will land in a future update.

Will my data sync to my partner's phone / my tablet / my laptop?

Not for live sync. Standalone Finance Management v1 is single-device by design — that's how we keep the privacy promise simple (no servers, nothing to leak). What you can do is take an encrypted backup file (see the next question) and restore it on the other phone. That's a one-shot copy, not continuous sync, but it's enough to move to a new device.

What if I lose my phone?

The app supports an encrypted backup. From Settings → Backup & restore, you choose a passphrase and the app produces a single .sfmbak file that contains your entire ledger, debts, categories, and detected patterns — fully encrypted with your passphrase. You can save that file to iCloud Drive, Google Drive, email it to yourself, or AirDrop it. On a fresh install, Restore from backup on the welcome screen asks for the file and the passphrase, decrypts it, and rebuilds your data exactly as it was at the moment of export.

Important caveats:

• The passphrase is the whole story. We never see it, we can't recover it. If you forget the passphrase, the backup is unreadable — by us, by you, by anyone. Pick something you can remember (a sentence of 4–6 ordinary words is much better than a short clever one) and consider writing it down somewhere physical.
• Bank connection isn't part of the backup. Your Tink consent stays on the original phone. After restoring on a new phone, tap Connect in Settings and authorise the bank again. Your historical transactions are restored from the backup, and the next sync just adds anything new since you exported.
• The backup is a snapshot. A backup from three weeks ago will be three weeks out of date. Make a fresh one whenever you've added a lot of manual transactions or after a major bank sync.

Why can't I see real-time notifications when my bank gets a payment?

Standalone Finance Management only checks for new transactions when you open the app or tap Sync. Background push notifications would require us to run a server that watches your bank for you, which would mean storing your tokens on our side — which would break the privacy promise. So: open the app and sync when you want fresh data.

Can I have multiple users on the same phone?

No. The app assumes one user per install. If you and a partner both want to track separately on the same phone, that's not supported today.

How do I export my data?

Two answers, depending on what you want:

• For backup or moving to a new phone: use Settings → Backup & restore → Export encrypted backup. You get a passphrase-protected .sfmbak file. (See What if I lose my phone? above.)
• For opening your data in a spreadsheet: a plain CSV/JSON export is still on the roadmap. Until then, the encrypted backup is the way to get all your data off the device, but it's only readable by another install of the app — not by Excel.

What happens if Standalone Finance Management goes out of business?

Your data stays on your phone exactly as it was the day before. No login servers to fail, no subscriptions to expire. The app keeps working in offline mode (manual transactions, ledger, debts) forever. Bank connection would stop working once tokens expire, but that's the only loss.

Does Standalone Finance Management cost money?

In testing, no. Pricing for the released version hasn't been decided yet.

• Access token. A temporary key your bank gives Standalone Finance Management after you authorise it, allowing the app to read your accounts for ~2 hours before needing renewal.
• Aggregator. A service like Tink that connects to many banks on behalf of apps like Standalone Finance Management, so we don't need to integrate each bank individually.
• Bridge. The tiny server Standalone Finance Management operates (on Cloudflare) that helps your phone talk to Tink during the authorisation step. The bridge stores nothing.
• Categorisation. Sorting your transactions into types — Food, Transport, Subscriptions, etc.
• Consent. Your formal permission to let Standalone Finance Management read your bank data. Required by EU open-banking law to be renewed every 90 days.
• Forecast. A 30-day projection of your balance, based on expected income deposits and recurring expenses.
• Income stream. A regularly-occurring deposit from the same source — usually a salary.
• Ledger. The full list of every transaction across all your accounts.
• Native currency. The currency a transaction was originally made in.
• Base currency. The currency you've picked for summaries — totals on the Dashboard are converted into this.
• Recurring subscription. A regularly-occurring expense from the same merchant — Netflix, Spotify, gym membership.
• Refresh token. A longer-lived key your bank gives Standalone Finance Management, used to renew access tokens silently in the background.
• Tink. The open-banking aggregator Standalone Finance Management uses to connect to your bank.
• Universal Link / App Link. A web URL (e.g. https://finance.appointer.hu/oauth/tink) that your phone's operating system recognises as belonging specifically to an installed app, and routes there directly. Stronger than the older "custom URL scheme" approach because the OS verifies app ownership of the domain.
• Encrypted backup (.sfmbak). A single file containing your full app data, locked with a passphrase you choose. We can't read it. Only another install of the app, with the right passphrase, can.
• Passphrase. The secret you choose when exporting a backup. Not the same as your phone's lock or your bank password — this one only protects the backup file. Forgetting it makes the backup unreadable.

• Privacy Policy: /projects/finance-manager/privacy — what data the app handles, where it lives, and what we (don't) do with it.
• Terms of Service: /projects/finance-manager/terms — the rules for using the app, the "this is not financial advice" disclaimer, and the limited-liability boilerplate.

Plain-language summary: we hold no data about you, we don't charge you, we don't sell anything, and we can't be held liable if the app's forecasts or categorisations lead you to a bad decision. Always double-check important numbers against your bank.

This guide is a living document. If something here is wrong, missing, or confusing, please flag it — concrete examples ("on the Debts screen, the X button doesn't work for me") are worth far more than general impressions.

• Email: support@finance.appointer.hu
• Security issues: same email; please mark the subject "SECURITY" so we triage it quickly.

Last updated 2026-05-16. Standalone Finance Management is in late testing; production launch follows Tink contract approval (M8 in the engineering plan). Recent additions to this guide: encrypted backup & restore (M7.8, design approved, implementation landing imminently), Universal/App-Link OAuth return (M7.9, shipped), Privacy Policy & Terms of Service published at finance.appointer.hu.