Welcome to Cash Compass!

Welcome to Cash Compass, your personal finance tracking tool. Let's get you started on your journey to better financial management.

Creating an Account

1. Visit the Cash Compass Website: Navigate to https://cashcompass.co in your web browser.

2. Register

   1. Username / Password:
      1. Click on the "Sign Up" button.
      2. Fill out the form with your desired email address and password.
      3. Click on the "Create Account" button.
   2. Google:
      1. Click on the "Log in with Google" button.
      2. Select or log in to your Google account.
   3. Regardless of the method chosen, after successful registration, you will be redirected to the home page. You will also receive a welcome email.

First steps

Generally, each of our features is split into three sections:

Input

Getting your data into Cash Compass. We focus on providing great forms, leveraging AI, to make this as easy as possible.

Management

Once your data is in Cash Compass, you can list it, filter it, edit it, and delete it.

Insights

Once you have enough data in Cash Compass, you can start to gain insights into your finances. We provide a variety of tools to help you do this.

You can dive deeper into the details on using all of our features in the other pages of this documentation. For now, let's get you started with some initial recommendations for using each of our major features.

Expenses

At Cash Compass, one of our core philosophies is that you should build a habit of tracking your expenses instead of setting up automated systems to do it for you. As such, we've built our expense tracking feature around making it as quick and easy as possible to input your expenses. Here are some tips for getting started:

1. Input transactions as you make them, our tools are designed with this in mind. If you can't do this, we recommend setting up transaction notifications in your various credit cards and bank accounts, this will help you remember to input your transactions later.
2. Enable Daily Reminder emails in your Email Settings to help you remember to input any transactions you missed, on a daily basis.
3. Create meaningful categories that you want to group/filter your expenses by. For example, you might want to create a category for "Groceries" and "Restaurants" instead of just "Food".
4. Check in on the Insights page to see how your spending is trending over time. By default it will show you insights for the current month, but you can change the date range to see how your spending has changed over the last three months, year, or whatever time period you want.

Accounts

Cash Compass believes that you should have a holistic view of your finances, including your bank and investment accounts. We also believe that you should regularly record your account balances manually, this achieves a few goals.

1. It helps you build a habit of checking in on your finances.
2. It ensures that you are regularly accessing your online accounts, which helps you identify any potential fraud or log in issues.
3. It builds trust in our insights, since you know exactly what data was inputted and when.

Now let's get into some initial recommendations for getting started with accounts:

1. Set up only the accounts that you want to track over time. For example, you might want to track your savings, investment, and retirement accounts, but it might not make sense to track your checking account or credit cards.
2. Update your account balances on a regular basis. We recommend doing this once a month, but you can do it as often as you like.
3. Bookmark the links to all of your financial accounts in your browser, this will make it easier to go through them when it's time to update your account balances.

Financial Tools

Cash Compass offers a variety of financial tools to help you with your personal finance needs. These tools cover topics like:

1. Portfolio re-balancing
2. 401k contribution calculations (coming soon)
3. FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) calculations (coming soon)

Unlike other tools you'll find online, with a Gold subscription, your data will be saved. This makes it easy to come back and update your inputs over time. We recommend you to check out what tools are available under the "Tools" menu in the navigation bar.

Next steps

You've got the basics! Feel free to explore the features available in Cash Compass or check out the other pages in this documentation to dive deeper into each feature.

Need Help?

If you encounter any issues or have questions during the sign-up process, please reach out to us at support@cashcompass.co.