Set up family accounting

Family accounting links your Personal space with your partner’s. Each of you keeps your own accounts, categories and reports, and your partner sees only what you share: a transaction you mark as Family or an account you mark as Joint. This article covers the setup: inviting, what the partner sees, joint accounts, shared categories and ending access. Family access is a Pro feature in a Personal space: the person who invites needs Pro, and the partner’s access is free. It is available on the web, Android and iOS. Business spaces don’t have family access; they share a space through members and roles instead.

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How family accounting works

A family in finerd is two Personal spaces linked together. Nothing is merged: your partner’s accounts, balances and history stay in their space, and yours stay in yours. One space can be in one family at a time. Linking changes nothing by itself. Your transactions stay private until you share them in one of two ways:

• Mark a transaction as Family. The line appears in your partner’s space as well, paid by you. Use it for a household expense from a private account; see Share household expenses from a private account.
• Mark an account as Joint. Every transaction on that account from a start date is shared automatically, and your partner sees the balance. See Share a whole account as joint below.

Both of you also get an account in the Family accounts group that stands for the other person. finerd uses it as the other side of shared money: when you transfer to your partner, choose this account as the destination so the transfer isn’t counted as an expense (Transfers from a joint account). Categories, merchants and tags belong to each space. A new family starts with Share categories & tags turned on, so a shared transaction keeps the same category for both of you. Turn it off if you’d rather file shared transactions your own way; see Share categories and tags.

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Invite your partner

You need Pro in your Personal space. Your partner needs a finerd account of their own, or they create one from your link. The link works for 3 days, and one invitation can be active at a time. On the web and iOS, your partner’s account in your space is named Partner. You can rename it later like any account.

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Accept the invitation

Your partner opens the link on any device. If they don’t have finerd yet, the page offers Get started to create an account first; the invitation is kept until they finish signing up. If they are signed in, they see You’ve been invited to manage family finances with your email and Your access is free, and they select Accept invite. The invitation always joins their Personal space, so it can’t be accepted while a Business space is open. After accepting, finerd shows the same slides and, on the web, offers to connect the Telegram bot, which can mark transactions as Family from chat. Both of you then see Family access with the partner’s account (Partner’s personal account on the web, Partner’s account on iOS, Family member on Android). If your partner is already in another family, finerd says You’re already a member of a family. They need to leave that family first: open Family access, select ⋮, then Leave family, and open your link again. Leaving keeps their past family transactions but stops new ones from the previous partner. If the two of you were a family before and reconnect, finerd tells you it is Reconnecting with partner and brings back the family transactions you shared earlier.

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What your partner sees

Until you share something, your partner sees nothing from your space: no accounts, balances, transactions, categories or reports. Each thing you share appears in their space as its own record: In your own space, shared transactions are filtered with Personal & Family → Family (Me) or Family (Partner), reports can be grouped By partner, and the web has a Family spending report with Personal, Family (Me) and Family (Partner) columns. A transaction your partner paid has Partner’s categorization in its ⋮ menu, so you can see how they filed it without changing your own category.

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Share a whole account as joint

Mark an account as joint when your partner should see its balance and every transaction, for example a shared card or the household savings. The bank doesn’t need to know the account as joint: finerd treats any of your accounts the same way. What you can’t share this way: a Debt account, Money on the way, the partner account itself, and a debt account linked with another person. Everything else, including bank, cash, investment, property and loan accounts, can be joint. From the start date, finerd marks every transaction on the account as Family, sends them to your partner and shares the balance. Transactions before the start date stay private. Your partner gets the account in their Accounts list with a family badge, and Family access lists it under Joint accounts. On a bank-connected account only you record transactions; on a manual joint account both of you can. A new expense from a joint account already carries the Family mark when you add it. To keep a single transaction private, see Make a joint-account transaction private. To check the date or stop sharing, open the account’s ⋮ menu and select Joint account info. Start date (iOS and Android: Shared since) shows when sharing began. Unmark as Joint stops new transactions from being shared; the transactions your partner already received stay in their space. On a bank-connected joint account only the person who shared it can unmark it; if you only see the account because your partner shared it, ask them.

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Share categories and tags

Share categories & tags in Family access (web and iOS; Android doesn’t have the switch yet) decides whether a shared transaction keeps one category and one set of tags in both spaces. It is on for a new family: a transaction you share arrives in your partner’s space with your category, and a category or tag either of you edits changes for both. Turn it off when you want to file shared transactions your own way: select the switch and confirm Turn off sharing. finerd warns that your reports and budgets may then differ from your partner’s. From then on, each of you categorizes shared transactions independently, and Partner’s categorization shows the other side’s choice. Turning it back on replaces your partner’s categorization of family transactions with yours; finerd asks you to confirm with Share anyway.

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End shared access

• A link you sent by mistake: revoke it as described in Invite your partner. A link that was already accepted can’t be revoked.
• The whole family: either partner can leave. Open Family access, select ⋮ in the header, then Leave family and confirm Leave. There is no way to remove a partner from your side: leaving is the only option, and it works the same for both of you.

After you leave:

• Both of you keep every family transaction you already have; the copies become ordinary transactions you can edit or delete. No new transactions are shared.
• Joint accounts are unmarked. The copy in your partner’s space stays as a normal account.
• The partner account is archived in both spaces and can’t be unarchived.
• Shared categories and tags stop syncing.

If the Pro subscription that covers the family ends, finerd leaves the family automatically after 7 days. You can invite the same person again later: finerd recognizes the previous partner and restores the family transactions you had shared.

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Related articles

• Share household expenses from a private account
• How joint-account transactions work for both partners
• Make a joint-account transaction private
• Shared transaction updates
• Transfers from a joint account
• Income, expenses and cash flow: family expenses