Getting Started
Need a little hand? Follow along to get your budget account all set up in no-time!
Last updated
Need a little hand? Follow along to get your budget account all set up in no-time!
Last updated
Congratulations on starting your 30-day trial with Lunch Money!
In this article, we’ll take you step-by-step to get you all set up, through the onboarding process, connecting your accounts, setting up your categories and budget, and the tools available to analyze your spending!
If you haven’t signed up yet, head over to lunchmoney.app to register and follow along!
Shall we begin?
The first step after you sign up to Lunch Money is to select your onboarding path. You will have the option to choose between the following:
Start fresh - This is the recommended option for following along with this Quick Start Guide. By going through the "Start fresh" path, you will be taken through some first steps to set up some categories and your date and currency display preferences.
Set up demo - This option will set up a demo budget account with pre-filled data so that you can play around with the different features before adding your personal bank accounts and transactions. Once you are done with the demo account, you can then create a new budget account to get started with your personal data.
Import from Mint - If you are migrating from Mint and have a CSV file containing your existing data, we recommend going with this option to import your transactions into Lunch Money. For a quick start guide on migrating from Mint, please see here.
Skip the walkthrough - This option will skip all the basic setup steps, giving you a completely blank slate to work with. There will be no categories set up, and you’ll be set with default date and display preferences.
In this guide, we'll be working off of the "Start fresh" path, meaning that after you've gone through onboarding, you’ll already have your basic categories, display and currency settings set up. On Step 3 of the onboarding process, we recommend linking at least one synced bank account:
There are various options for adding your transactions into Lunch Money. Transactions can be added manually, imported via CSV file, or automatically imported from synced bank accounts.
If you have already added an account for automatic bank syncing and see your transactions on the Transactions page, you’re ready to start categorizing your transactions and can skip to Step 3 of this article.
If you didn't add an account for automatic bank syncing at the end of onboarding, you'll want to head over to the Accounts page and start by adding some of your most frequently used accounts — this could be a credit card or a checking/savings account.
By adding a synced bank account, your transactions will automatically sync into Lunch Money, yet you can also set up manually-managed accounts for any institutions not currently supported for automatic syncing. For manually-managed accounts, you can either add transactions manually, or import transactions in bulk with a CSV file.
How to add a synced bank account
Open the Accounts page
Click on the "Add account" button to open the 'Add Account or Asset' panel on the right-side of the screen:
Next, click on "Auto-import from my bank", select the relevant country, and click on "Continue":
Once the Plaid dialogue loads, click on "Get Started" and log in (or continue as guest)
In the search bar, type the name of your institution and select the relevant option from the list:
Follow the instructions on the screen to enter your credentials
Once your login is confirmed, check all accounts that you’d like to connect from the institution, and click on "Continue". If the connection was successful, you'll see a confirmation screen and can click on "Continue" again.
Next, you'll choose how you'd like to set up this new account within Lunch Money. You will set the display name, and since this is your first account, toggle the option for "No, this is a new account or I will merge it later" and click on "Start Importing":
Your synced accounts will be added to the table on the Accounts page and a confirmation message will appear on the bottom left of the screen:
If you use banking institutions not currently supported within Lunch Money, you can head back to the Accounts page to add them. Manually-managed account balances are updated automatically when you add, remove or update a transaction assigned to that account.
Manually-managed accounts are also great for tracking cash in your wallet, assets (eg. car or real estate), gift card or loyalty account balances, and crypto-currency.
Once you've added your manually managed-account, you can manually create transactions on the Transactions page, or bulk import transactions with a CSV file.
CSV importing is a popular choice for getting bulk transactions into Lunch Money. This is a quick way to import historical transaction data for synced accounts, or current transaction data for manually-managed accounts. To read more about the CSV Import feature, click here.
Categories are set up and managed on the Categories page, and are an essential way to organize your transactions. Categories also dictate how associated transactions will be treated throughout Lunch Money.
To successfully work within Lunch Money, it’s important to understand the difference between income, expense and transfer categories. To read about category properties, click here.
While you should already have your basic categories set up from the onboarding stage, we also recommend checking out the Auto-Categorization tool on the Categories page to help create and automatically assign categories to your synced transactions. To learn more about Auto-Categorization, click here.
If you wish to manually categorize or simply review your categorized transactions, you can head over to the Transactions page. Categorizing manually may take some time initially but eventually, you'll barely need to do manual work to organize transactions as the system will automatically create rules to auto-categorize future similar transactions.
If you'd like to prevent rules from being created when you update categories, you can disable this option under 'Rule preferences' on the Settings page.
Recurring Items are helpful when you want to track transactions that repeat regularly, whether they are expenses (eg. subscriptions, rent) or income (eg. monthly salary).
Recurring items represent repeating income or expenses transactions, with either fixed or fluctuating amounts, that would generally occur on a regular cadence with predictable dates (eg. twice a month, every 6 months, annually, etc.).
Some examples of recurring income include:
Monthly fixed salary
Bi-weekly salary
Monthly credit card money-back rewards
Some examples of recurring expenses include:
Annual streaming service subscription (eg. Netflix, Spotify, etc.)
Gym membership that renews every 4 weeks
Monthly rent payments
Annual land tax payments
Having Recurring Items set up helps you plan ahead, and if an expected expense or income is missed, you'll be able to see it marked as missing in the recurring item details, so that you can review and fix it if necessary. The projected spending and income defined by your Recurring Items are also important to consider when planning your budget.
Rules are automatically created when a recurring item is set up. The rules will automatically link transactions to a recurring item if the cadence, amount and payee are a match. Additional rules to link transactions to recurring items can also be set up manually via the Rules page.
The process to set up Recurring Items is the same for Income and for Expenses, but the step below describe it with the wording specific to recurring expenses:
Open the Recurring page
Click on "Add New Recurring Item" to open up the 'Create Recurring Item' panel on the right side of the screen
Fill in the recurring item details starting with the merchant name and set the transaction category.
For the estimated billing date, select the day in the month when you expect the payment to generally occur
For the repeating cadence, select the relevant value from the list (eg. "monthly", "twice a month") or select "Custom" to set your own cadence
Under "Optional Properties", you can also select an account in the "Paid from account" field. If this is set to a specific account, Lunch Money will know to look for the transaction under that specific account.
Click "next", and on the next page you will enter either a fixed amount, or a range (if the amount tends to fluctuate):
Finalize by clicking on "Create".
Once set up, all recurring items will appear in the table. If you have yearly recurring items, they will only appear in the table for the month on which they are due.
If you have automatically-syncing accounts connected, Lunch Money will automatically search through new transactions as they sync, based on the Rules that you have set up, and once a transaction matches, it will automatically be linked to the relevant Recurring Item. If a recurring transaction doesn’t link automatically, you can learn more about manual linking by click here.
Now that you have all of your transactions categorized and recurring items set up, it's time to plan your budget!
Setting up and managing the budget is done via the Budget page, where you will find all your budgetable categories.
If you did not enable the “Exclude from budget” property for your income and transfer categories, they will also display on the Budget page. You can learn more about category properties here.
In the first column on the far left of the Budget table, you will enter your allotted budget for each expense category (eg. Groceries, Transportation, Personal Care, Restaurants, Home Improvement, etc.).
In the table, you will also be able to see your spending and how much you have left to spend within each category, and on the right side of the screen, you will also have an overview of your total spending as it compares to your total budget:
Once you have the budget defined, you will be able to start analyzing your spending and control your savings!
Do you share your expenses with a partner? Invite them to collaborate on your budget on Lunch Money! You can invite any number of collaborators from the Settings page and they will have full access to your Lunch Money data while each having their own individual login.
Once your transactions are organized properly, you can view your spending breakdown and budget breakdown on the Overview page. To switch between the spending breakdown and budget breakdown, click on the little gear icon on the right side of the box and change the "show again" option:
You can also get quick insights from the Net Worth, Stats and Trends pages.
For a more curated view of your data, you can head over to the Analyze page. The Query Tool will give you a detailed view of your income and expense data. You can also switch between the different graphs and charts and compare datasets. Understanding your spending habits and trends will help you figure out what your goals are, where you may need to cut down to save, or where you might have mis-organized transactions that need your attention.
In Lunch Money, you can create unlimited budgeting accounts per subscription. If you’d like to create a new budget to manage separately from your first budget, you can certainly do so!
To set up a new budgeting account, click on the circle next to the "Logout" button to open the 'Switch Accounts' menu. Then, click on "Create new budget account":
You will then enter a budget account name, and can toggle whether you’d like to copy the categories and tags from the current budget or not. To confirm, click on "Create new budget".
You will then be presented with the onboarding menu (see Step 1) and can choose between starting fresh, setting up a demo, importing your data from CSV, or starting with a blank slate.
If you run into any questions, would like to share feedback, or report an issue that you are experiencing, you can use the in-app support menu located at the top of the page anywhere within Lunch Money:
You will then see the following menu options:
Select "Submit a bug or feedback" to report an issue or to share feedback for specific Lunch Money features.
Select "Open bank syncing support ticket" to report an issue with your synced bank accounts or synced transaction data.
Select "View and submit feature requests" to open the Feedback Board, where you can report bugs or create feature requests for public voting.
Select "Visit our knowledge base" to quickly access this knowledge base. This is the recommended place to look for information when you have general questions and are looking for a quick answer or step-by-step instructions on how to do certain actions! On the left-side you will find the menu where you can find more information on the different pages and features within Lunch Money. On the top right corner, you can click on the search bar to search a keyword, or type out questions:
Select "Join our Discord community" to visit Lunch Money’s Discord server. There, you will be able to ask questions and get answers from other Lunch Money users.
Select "Email support@lunhcmoney.app" to send a direct message to our Support Team via the default emailing software installed on your computer, or copy the email address and manually compose a new message in your preferred email service.
