User Manual

Havnest Money is a household finance powerhouse — a single source of truth for your household, serving as a home for your income, your expenses, your budgets, and your plans for the future. It's built for more than one person: everyone in your household can see the same real picture from their own phone, tablet, or computer, with access controls and data security built into the app's core.

Household

The group of people sharing a Havnest Money account — usually a family or a couple. One household, one shared set of categories and budgets, and one financial truth for the entire household — with adjustable visibility settings per user. Single-person households are also fully supported.

Accounts

Anything money sits in or is owed on — a checking account, cash, a credit card, an investment, even a house, a car or a loan.

Categories

What a transaction is actually for — Groceries, Rent, Salary, and so on — the basis for every budget.

Planned vs. Paid vs. Overdue

A transaction can be Paid (already happened), Planned (expected, but hasn't happened yet), or Overdue (was planned for a date that's now passed and still hasn't been marked paid). This distinction allows Havnest Money to analyze the past and the future separately, and in a combined, holistic way as well.

Most screens that list transactions or add up totals carry a small tickmark toggle — tap it to switch between seeing Paid only (what's actually happened) and Paid, Planned & Overdue together (a fuller, forward-looking picture, including what's still to come). It looks like this:

A suggested way to get started, if you're not sure where and how.

1. Add your accounts

Start with whatever you check most — a checking account, cash, a credit card. See Accounts for how, including importing history from a CSV file instead of entering it all by hand.

2. Set up a category or two

You don't need every category budgeted on day one — pick one or two that actually matter to you right now, or use the Budget Wizard on the Planning tab to set up your most typical budgets and repeating transactions easily, in a matter of minutes. See Categories & Budgets.

3. Bring in the rest of your household

If you're not the only one managing money in the household, add the people who need their own sign-in. See Household.

4. Look at Analytics

Once there's some real data in, Analytics is where the bigger picture starts to show up. See the Analytics Overview. With data going in, your Home screen also starts to populate, giving you the most urgent insights.

Home is the first thing you see on opening Havnest Money — a dashboard of cards, each a live snapshot of one part of your household's finances, so you can take stock without digging through individual tabs.

The Today card

Sits at the top, grouping whatever needs your attention right now: Overdue transactions first, then anything that is Planned for today.

Everything else

Below it, a row of further cards — Budgets, Cash flow, Expenses, Forecasted balance, Liabilities, Net Worth, Readily available funds, Investments, Retirement savings, and Projects — each a condensed version of its own full screen. Tapping any card opens that real screen, already scoped to what the card was showing. Budgets, Retirement savings, and Projects only appear once there's actually something to show — a budget set, a retirement scenario with planned monthly contributions set up, or an active project — so the dashboard doesn't show empty cards for features you haven't started using yet.

Two cards worth calling out specifically, since they answer a slightly different question than the rest.

Net Worth

What you own minus what you owe, split into its two halves — Assets and Liabilities — so you can see which side is actually driving the number.

Investments

Your total invested balance, including anything linked in through our companion app, Foliopal, alongside how it's changed over the last 30 days — a quick read on whether things are trending up or down, without opening a full chart.

The set and order of cards on Home is entirely yours to arrange — every household has different priorities.

Reordering & hiding

An edit button switches the dashboard into edit mode, where every card — including ones currently hidden — shows a drag handle to reorder it, and a button to show or hide it. The layout is saved on each device, allowing each user to set up the most convenient view for themselves.

The Calendar shows every transaction on the day it actually happened, or is planned to happen on — a month grid where each day carries a small dot for anything happening on it, and tapping a day opens the full list underneath that day. Tapping the same day again shows all the transactions for the whole month in view. It's the fastest way to see what's coming up alongside what's already happened, in the order it happens in real life.

Reading the dots

A day's dot is colored by status — amber for Overdue, blue for Planned, teal for Paid — so a glance at the month tells you where anything is still outstanding before you even open it. A dark grey dot marks an entry that shrinks as you log real purchases (see Transactions).

Searching & filtering

The same search and filter tools as everywhere else in Havnest Money work here too — by category, partner, note, custom ID, type, amount, the account involved, or tag — narrowing both the list of transactions presented, and which dots show on the grid itself.

Fullscreen & multi-select

A button in the top-right corner of the transaction list expands the list to fill the screen when you need more room; the same list also supports multi-select (long-press a row), so several transactions can be deleted together, if needed. Swiping right on a row reveals the option to duplicate a transaction, while swiping left allows you to delete a single transaction.

Every account you track — checking, savings, credit cards, cash, investments, even something like a car or a loan — lives in Havnest Money as an account, kept in one of seven types (Payment, Cash, Savings, Credit card, Investment, Other asset, Other liability) so similar things stay grouped together. Each one keeps a running balance that updates itself the moment a transaction is logged against it, so there's no manual reconciling — you always know exactly how much you have, and how much you owe, across everything at once.

Adding an account

Adding your first account takes only a few taps: the pencil icon in the top-right corner of the Accounts screen opens edit mode, then tap "Add" next to whichever account type you want. Give it a name, a currency, and a starting balance — its balance from that point on, is just that starting figure plus every transaction logged afterwards.

Ownership & visibility

Every account is owned either by one specific member, or by the household as a whole (marked "shared ownership" so any adult can manage it together — useful for something like a joint checking account or a family house). The ownership setting of an account determines which users can add, edit, or delete transactions inside that account.

Separately, every account's visibility can be set to the whole household, to a chosen list of members, or kept private — so, for example, that same joint account can stay visible to both parents, while a child only ever sees their own account.

Admin level users can see all accounts, and can add, edit, or delete transactions inside any account in the household.

Importing your history

Once an account exists, you can import its existing transaction history from a CSV file exported by your bank or another finance app, instead of entering everything by hand.

Every entry in Havnest Money — money in, money out, or moved between your own accounts — is a transaction, and this screen lists all of them across every account in one unified view, sorted by date. It's the one place to search or browse your entire history, when you are unsure who the transaction belongs to, and in which account it lives in.

Adding one

Tap the "+" button on any screen in the Records tab to open a new entry — choose its type (Income, Expense, Transfer, or one of the Asset/Liability types (a purchase or sale, or acquiring or paying off a debt)). The fields that show up adjust to the type: an Expense asks for the account, partner, and category it's for; a Transfer asks for the source and destination accounts instead. Every transaction gets a date, an amount, and a status — Paid, Planned, or Overdue.

Recurring transactions

Anything that repeats — rent, a subscription, a paycheck — can be set up once as a recurring series (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), with an end condition of never, a specific date, or after a set number of occurrences, instead of re-entering it every time. Havnest Money creates the individual future occurrences for you; editing or deleting one afterward lets you choose whether the change applies to just that occurrence, that one and every future one, or the whole series — and whatever you've already marked Paid is never touched by any of the three, so past history stays exactly as it happened. Adjusting the date of a recurring series is not possible after it has been saved — changes to the Date field will only affect the single occurrence that is currently open. If you need to change the dates of the entire series, you need to delete the whole series (delete one occurrence, and you will be prompted if you want to delete the whole series), and then set it up again with the new dates.

Shrinking by paid transactions over the month

For something you spend on through many small purchases rather than one bill — groceries, fuel, a hobby — a recurring transaction can be switched to "Shrink by paid transactions over the month" when it is first created (it can't be changed once saved). It stays a single planned amount dated at the end of each month, but every time you log a matching real purchase — same account, same subcategory, and same type — as Paid, the planned amount shrinks by that much, so your forecast and totals stay accurate all month instead of only at the very end. Once the real purchases fully cover it, or the month ends, the planned entry removes itself. It isn't meant for a single bill like electricity, and while it's on, that entry's status and reminder are locked. These entries are marked with a dark grey edge in every transaction list, and a dark grey dot in the Calendar.

Tags

A Tag is free-form label that cut across categories, useful for tracking all incomes and expenses related to special projects, like "Kitchen Renovation" or the Retirement Planner's monthly contributions across whatever categories and accounts it touches. A transaction can carry one or more Tags.

Searching & managing

Search matches category, partner, note, custom ID, type, amount, the account involved, and tags all at once. Swipe a row to duplicate or delete it, or use multi-select (long press) to delete several at a time.

Moving money between two of your own accounts within Havnest Money — e.g. paying off a credit card debt from a checking account, or sweeping cash into savings — is its own transaction type, Transfer, kept separate from Income and Expense because it isn't really either: nothing was earned or spent, it just moved "internally" within the household's finances.

How it's recorded

A transfer needs a source account and a destination account instead of a category or partner. If the two accounts use different currencies, it also asks for an exchange rate and the resulting amount on the receiving side — so a transfer between a USD account and a EUR account records correctly on both ends, in each account's own currency.

Showing up on both sides

A single transfer appears in both accounts' own histories automatically — you never enter it twice. If you're importing history from a CSV file that covers both accounts, Havnest Money recognizes the same transfer described from each side and won't create a duplicate.

Rather than typing in years of history by hand, an account can import it from a CSV file — the kind almost every bank and finance app can export. A short, guided wizard walks you through matching that file's own columns to what Havnest Money needs, allowing you to visually verify what will be imported before you commit to it.

The steps

Pick the file and confirm its columns (which one is the date, the amount, and so on), then map whatever transaction types, categories, and status values it uses onto Havnest Money's own fields. If a row is a transfer, asset purchase, or similar and its counterpart account isn't obvious from the file alone, you'll be asked to resolve it directly. A full preview shows exactly what's about to be created before anything is actually imported.

Duplicate protection

Havnest Money checks for likely duplicates automatically before committing — so importing the same file twice by mistake, or importing the same transfer from both accounts' own separate exports, doesn't leave you with double entries.

Categories are how Havnest Money organizes what you spend and earn — things like Groceries, Rent, or Salary — and a budget is simply the amount you plan to typically spend, or expect to earn, in a given category, for whatever period you choose. Every category's real spend or income updates automatically as new transactions come in, so "I think I'm spending too much on X" turns into a real, current number instead of a hunch — and decisions about where to cut back, or where there's additional room to spend, are based on your own numbers.

Categories & subcategories

A category can have subcategories for more detail — splitting "Food & drinks" into Groceries and Dining out, for example. Budgets and spend roll up automatically: a parent category's total is always the sum of its subcategories, so a single change never needs updating in two places.

Setting a budget

Pick a category, pick a period — day, week, month, or year — and enter the amount you're planning for. You can move freely backward and forward in time to see how a past period actually went, or check progress on the current one as it happens. A category that has subcategories will automatically get its total budget from the sum of the budgets set for its subcategories, while a category with no subcategories can have its own budget set.

Income categories too

Categories and budgets aren't just for spending — income (Salary, and anything else money regularly comes in from) is tracked and budgeted the exact same way.

Budget Wizard

The quickest way to set up a batch of budgets and recurring monthly transactions at once is the Budget Wizard — the "Launch Budget Wizard" button on the Categories & Budgets card on the Planning screen (available to admins). Choose whether things start this month or next, then step through income, debts, and the everyday expense themes, entering for each line the typical monthly amount, the account it moves through, and whether it's due at the start or the end of the month — "End of month" always means each month's actual last day. The last screen summarizes what you're adding in that session.

The Wizard is purely additive: every time you open it, it starts blank, and it only ever creates new recurring series and adds to a category's budget — it never changes or removes anything you already have. To adjust or delete something set up earlier, edit it from the Transactions tab or from Categories & Budgets instead; adding the same category again in the Wizard creates a second, separate series. For groceries and similar categories, each line can also be set to "Shrink by paid transactions over the month" (switched on by default there), so the planned amount shrinks automatically as you log the real purchases — see Transactions.

A Project tracks spend toward one specific goal — a kitchen renovation, a wedding, a car — that usually cuts across several ordinary categories and accounts at once, which a regular category budget is unable to capture cleanly on its own.

Setting one up

Give it a name and, optionally, a total budget — leave it at zero to just track total spend with no cap. Then pick one or more tags: any transaction carrying one of those tags, wherever it happens to live, will count toward the project automatically.

Tracking progress

A project's total spend is automatically accumulated from every tagged transaction, and progress is updated the moment anything changes. Its status — Active, Completed, or Archived — is yours to set once you're done with it (marking a project Completed or Archived also removes it from the Home screen's Projects card).

A highly customizable and realistic retirement scenario planner, projecting your household's savings toward retirement — whether you are planning to F.I.R.E. (Financial Independence, Retire Early), or retire at your retirement age, this planner shows you the real picture. It is seeded from your own real numbers rather than a generic calculator, and is always adjustable as your plans change over the years. You can set up more than one scenario, for different assumptions, or separate retirement plans for different household members.

Setting up a scenario

Choose who it's for (a specific household member, or shared), your current age, the age you plan to retire, and how far to plan beyond that. Pick a country where you plan to retire (for a starting inflation assumption, based on that country's own long-run average — always editable), an expected return on your existing investments, and which of your accounts should actually grow at that rate — a house or a car is carried forward at today's value instead, since those don't behave like an investment. A suggested monthly contribution is automatically calculated based on all this data, which will allow you to reach the target age; monthly retirement spend and an optional expected pension round out the assumptions, both in today's money (which gets accounted for yearly inflation when looking at it into the future).

Reading the projection

The scenario's detail screen charts your projected balance from now through your plan-until age, and tells you plainly whether it's on track or when it's projected to run out — along with the minimum monthly contribution that would actually get you there, for comparison.

Tracking real contributions

Tag any transaction that's really going toward this plan — buying investments, moving money to savings — and the scenario tracks how what you've actually contributed compares to what the plan assumed, since the date you started it.

Download to Excel

Want to see the actual maths behind the calculations? Tap the three dots in the top-right corner to export a monthly breakdown of a retirement scenario into an XLSX file.

Analytics is where Havnest Money answers the bigger and deeper questions that your day-to-day screens don't — seven analytics views, each built around one real question a household actually asks:

• How much is everything we own worth?
• Where money comes from and goes to?
• Whether you're gaining or losing over time?
• How much do you owe?
• How much will we have in the future?
• Are we on track vs our budget?
• What repeats every month?

One shared toolkit

Most Analytics screen share the same tools: a date range you can move freely through, and filters for type, account, owner, category, partner, and tag — so you can narrow any of them down to, say, just one account or one household member. The same Paid-only tickmark from Key Concepts controls whether a screen is looking at what's actually already happened, or a fuller forward-looking picture that includes Planned and Overdue transactions as well.

What-if entries

Any transaction can be marked "What if?" when entering it — a hypothetical transaction for simulation purposes only. Every Analytics screen excludes these by default, but there is a toggle to include them when you actually want to see how your finances would play out if this transaction wasn't hypothetical anymore. Useful as a tool to imagine how your household finances would look like if you decide to buy that new car, for example.

What your household is actually worth — everything you own minus everything you owe — charted over time, with Assets and Liabilities broken out separately underneath so you can see which side is really moving the number.

Where your money actually comes from, and where it actually goes — a bar for income and a bar for expenses, for whatever period you choose, that you can tap into for the full breakdown.

Drilling down

Tap either bar to open a donut breaking it down further — by Category, by Partner, or by Account owner. All three are available and reorderable, so if you care more about who's spending than what it's spent on, put Account owner first.

Comparing periods

Switch to a month-by-month or year-by-year view to see the same bars laid out side by side, with a dashed line marking your own average — useful for spotting a month that was genuinely unusual rather than just the most recent one.

Whether your day-to-day money is genuinely growing or shrinking over time — a single running line, starting at zero at the beginning of whatever period you're looking at, rising and falling with every transaction along the way.

Scope

Counts the same literal Income and Expense transactions as Income & Expenses — across every account, not just cash and payment ones — so its own total for any period always matches that screen's Profit/Loss figure exactly. A Transfer, or buying or selling something like a car or an investment, doesn't count as income or expense here even though it moves real money — that's what Forecasted balance and Net Worth answer instead, since they track actual balances rather than earnings and spending.

Splitting the line

Instead of one combined line, you can split it by type, by account, or by household member — useful for seeing whether a dip came from one specific account rather than the household as a whole.

How much you owe, tracked over time — credit cards and other liabilities specifically, shown as a single trend line so a debt actually going down (or quietly creeping up) is obvious at a glance, rather than buried in individual account balances.

How much money you'll actually have going forward — the one Analytics screen that defaults to including Planned and Overdue items alongside Paid ones, since its whole purpose is looking ahead rather than back.

What it's projecting

Runs your real current balance forward through every Planned transaction and recurring series already on the books — rent, subscriptions, upcoming income — so you can see a dip before it happens, not after. Like Cash flow, it's scoped to cash and payment-type accounts, where this kind of short-term forecast is actually meaningful.

Whether you're actually staying on track against the budgets you've set — the deeper companion to Categories & Budgets' own quick progress bars, with two ways to look at it.

Actual vs. Budget

Two rings — one for income, one for expenses — showing real totals against what you budgeted for the period, plus every category broken out individually underneath.

Comparison

A month-by-month or year-by-year bar view, the same shape as Income & Expenses' own comparison tabs, with your budgeted amount marked directly on each bar so a month that missed its target is obvious at a glance.

Every recurring series in the household in one list — rent, subscriptions, a regular paycheck — with two headline totals for monthly outflow and monthly income, each converted to a common monthly figure regardless of whether the series itself repeats weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Sorting & grouping

Sort by next due date, or group everything by parent category to see, for instance, every subscription sitting under "Entertainment" together. Tapping either headline total filters the list down to just that direction.

Two small preferences that apply across the whole app: Appearance (System, Light, or Dark) and how many decimal places numbers show (none, one, or two) — whichever way you'd rather read your own figures. System follows your device's built-in settings, switching automatically between Light and Dark modes during the day.

A Havnest Money household can have more than one person in it — a partner, family members, even your kids — each with their own profile. Everyone sees a shared, always-current picture of the household's money, but the household's admins get to decide exactly what each person can see and do: an admin can manage everything, an adult member shares in the same day-to-day access, and a child gets a simplified, safe experience built just for them. This screen — reached from Settings, and open to every member to view, though most of it is admin-only to change — is where all of that gets set up and managed.

The three access levels

Admin can manage everything: add, edit, and remove members; grant or revoke admin rights for anyone else; rename the household; and manage any account's ownership or visibility, regardless of who set it up. A household always needs at least one admin-level user to exist — Havnest Money won't let you remove admin rights from the only admin left in the household.

Adult (non-admin) members can add, edit, and delete transactions of their own accounts (or those of shared accounts), view accounts they are allowed to see, and view and set up budgets, using every planning and analytics screen. What actually varies from person to person lives on each individual account: any account can be shared with the whole household, shared with a specific list of members, or kept private to just its owner. A non-admin adult can't manage other members or change household-wide settings.

Child profiles get a deliberately separate, simplified version of the app: their own single account, set up automatically; a simple way to log "I received money" or "I spent money"; a "Plan to buy" wishlist for things they're saving toward; and a short history of their own activity. No budgets, no visibility into anyone else's balances, no settings — an admin manages everything about a child's profile from this screen.

Adding a member

Tap "Add member," then choose Adult or Child. For an adult: enter a display name and email address and send — Havnest Money emails them an invitation. They open it, see which household they're being invited to, and create their own account with their own password and name; accepting the invitation registers them the moment they finish signing up. You don't have to wait for that, either — accounts can be set up and even assigned to a newly invited member straight away, even while waiting for the acceptance of the invitation.

For a child: A child might not have an email address, therefore, the sign-up process does not require them to have one at all. The admin enters their display name and sets a password for them (at least 8 characters), and Havnest Money creates their sign-in credentials immediately — a short, auto-generated sign-in name is shown once, together with the password you just chose, and a Cash account is automatically set up for them in the background (visible as a normal Cash account for adult users). A child never receives an invitation and never creates their own account; an admin sets everything up on their behalf.

During the first time anyone new signs in, adult or child, their device needs the household's own decryption key before it can read any of the household's financial data. That's either a quick scan of a code from an already-set-up device, or typing in the household's Recovery Key directly — see How your data is protected for the full picture, including why that key matters so much.

Editing a member

Tap anyone in the list to open their profile. Anyone can rename themselves, and an admin can rename anyone. An admin can also grant or revoke another adult's Admin rights (a Child profile cannot be upgraded to admin status). Moving someone between Adult and Child isn't something you can change once they've been added — decide that when you first create their profile.

Changing a password

For yourself, as an adult: Settings → Security → "Change my password" — enter your current password once, then your new one (at least 8 characters, including a number).

For a child: an admin resets it from that child's own profile on this Household screen ("Change password," under Sign-in). The new password is shown once, right there on screen, and never again, so make sure the child (or whoever helps them sign in) actually gets it before closing the screen. The same section also has a QR code that signs a child's device in directly, without typing anything at all.

Anything else worth knowing

If someone hasn't accepted their invitation yet, their profile shows "Invited" with a "Resend invitation email" option — useful if the original email got lost or expired. Removing a member is admin-only (you can't remove yourself this way), and Havnest Money will first ask who should inherit that person's accounts — any other already-registered member — since an account can never be left without an owner. Whoever inherits the removed user's data will have their name assigned to the removed person's accounts.

Every account can hold its own separate currency, but Havnest Money still needs one common currency for the household, in which it can present all the aggregated data — for a total budget, a net worth figure, or any household-wide number that spans across accounts in different currencies. That's the primary currency: admin-only to change, and it's conversion rate vs. every other currency is automatically fetched and updated on a daily basis.

You can switch primary currency any time — It doesn't affect the currency your accounts are actually storing the transactional data in.

A Partner is whoever is on the other end of a transaction — a shop, an employer, a landlord. You add these directly when setting up a transaction - the first time you type a new name into a transaction's Partner field, Havnest Money remembers it for next time, so typing "Tesco" once means it's there to pick from afterwards.

Havnest Money intelligently connects Partners with Categories — if the first time you assigned "Groceries" to the partner called "Tesco", then Havnest Money will automatically assign future transactions with Tesco to this category, saving you time. You can overwrite this auto-selected category, of course.

Managing the list

Search to find one, tap it to edit its details (address, phone, email — all optional), or delete it if it's no longer needed. A partner can only be deleted once nothing references it — reassign or remove its transactions first if you want to clear one out.

An admin-only group of three areas, all about how your household's data is protected and how you keep hold of it.

Encryption

Explains how your data is protected and holds your household's Recovery Key details — see How your data is protected for the full picture.

Export data

Exports your household transactions to an XLSX or CSV file, in plain, readable format. Important: your exported data is NOT encrypted, therefore, keeping it secure is your responsibility after exporting.

Backup & Restore

Covered in its own section below.

Two things live here: on a device that supports it, a toggle to sign in with Face ID or Touch ID instead of typing your password every time; and "Change my password" — see Household for exactly how that works, and why it's handled differently for an admin resetting a child's password.

Two tools for confirming your data is exactly where it should be — open to every member, not just admins.

Verify data sync

Compares row counts between this device and cloud storage — a quick way to confirm nothing's out of sync without doing a full re-download. A mismatch right after a change on another device is normal — please allow a few minutes for each device to catch up with syncing.

Force full re-sync

Re-downloads all of your household's data from the cloud from scratch, correcting anything this device might have missed. Your data itself lives in the cloud storage, and is not touched during this process — this only affects what is stored locally on this one device.

A child's profile doesn't get the regular 5-tab app — it gets a single, deliberately simplified screen built just for them, with none of the budgets, settings, or other members' balances an adult sees.

What a child sees and can do

Their own balance, a big "I received money" / "I spent money" pair of buttons for logging things simply, a "Plan to buy" wishlist for things they're saving toward, and a short history of their own activity with a balance chart. Everything they log goes straight into their own single account, auto-categorized as "Gifts received" for income, and "Kids" for expenses — no category picker for them to navigate.

Signing in

A child signs in with a short, auto-generated sign-in name and the password an admin set for them (see Household for how that's created and reset). Once signed in, an admin can also show a QR code from that child's profile that unlocks the household data, without typing anything.

Foliopal is a separate investment portfolio tracker (foliopal.app) that precisely tracks investments across multiple brokers and currencies, with real FX-adjusted gains and deep analytics. If you already have a Foliopal account, connecting it brings your real investment balances into Havnest Money automatically, refreshed once every hour.

How it shows up

Each broker/tax-label combination in your Foliopal account becomes its own read-only account here — its assets' combined value, and, separately, any uninvested cash sitting in that same bucket. They can't be edited directly in Havnest Money (only the bucket balances are pulled from Foliopal), and they're clearly marked with a Foliopal badge wherever they appear.

Disconnecting

Disconnecting Foliopal stops the hourly refresh, but the accounts stay exactly as they are at their last synced balance — nothing is deleted, and reconnecting at any time picks the sync back up.

Havnest Money uses 256-bit end-to-end encryption to protect the actual financial content you enter, making it practically impossible to break using brute-force attack methods. Every transaction's amount and note, account and category names, and custom IDs are encrypted this way, meaning that this content is scrambled into unreadable text before it ever leaves your device, and only your own household can unlock it again — even the people who run Havnest Money have absolutely no way of reading it.

What stays in plain text

A handful of structural fields aren't encrypted — things like a transaction's date, its status (Paid, Planned, or Overdue), its type, and which account or category it's linked to (none of these carry any financial content on their own). We need to keep these readable specifically so Havnest Money can sync, sort, and organize your data across every device in your household, without needing to have your decryption key (Recovery key). Nobody outside your household can see what you spent, earned, or own — only that some transaction happened, on some date, in some state.

Why this matters

You can enter real, sensitive financial information — salaries, debts, medical costs, anything — without worrying about who might see it. Privacy here isn't something you have to configure or take on trust; it's built into the core of the app.

Three layers: what each one is for

Havnest Money asks you to prove it's you in three different ways, each for a different job. Most days you'll only ever meet the first one.

Face ID / Touch ID, or your PIN — a quick check that the person holding the phone is you. Asked when you open the app, and when you come back to it after more than two minutes away. You set up your PIN when you create your account; it's used whenever Face ID or Touch ID doesn't work, or on a device that doesn't have them. It only unlocks an app you're already signed into — it's not a way to sign in.

Your email and password — proves you own your account. Asked when you sign in, again at least every 30 days on each device to stay signed in, and before the most sensitive actions: exporting a readable copy of your data, and deleting your household. You can change it any time from Settings, or reset it by email if you forget it.

Your household's Recovery Key — the key that actually unlocks your encrypted data. It's only needed when a device doesn't already hold it: signing in on a new device (unless you scan the "Add a device" code from one that's already set up), signing back in after signing out, restoring a backup from a file, and downloading your data from the sign-in screen. Unlike your password, it can't be reset — see below.

Your Recovery Key

Your household has its own Recovery Key, generated the first time encryption was set up, and is NOT stored anywhere inside Havnest Money or its online servers. When this key is generated, you are prompted to save it for yourself somewhere safe, and you even have the option to download it in a printable PDF format, which you can put away into a safe.

Your devices keep working without it day to day, so it's easy to forget the key exists — but if you ever sign out of, reset, or lose every signed-in device, that key is the only way back into your data. Keep it somewhere safe, like a password manager or a printed copy in a drawer. Havnest Money is NOT able to recover your data for you without it, precisely because we can't read the data either. To help, household admins get a short reminder every three months to check that the key is still kept safe.

If you ever realise the key is lost, act while a device is still signed in: you can still export a readable copy of your data from Settings → Data → Export data, confirmed with your account password.

There is also a button inside Data → Encryption for a household admin to download the household's data in the actual encrypted form it is stored in, allowing the admin to verify that it is truly unreadable on its own.

Being precise about the actual boundary, beyond the short version in How your data is protected: we cannot read your transaction amounts, notes, or the names you've given your accounts, categories, or partners — that content is encrypted in a way that only you can decrypt. What we can still technically see is the "shape" of your data, not its meaning — that you have a certain number of transactions, roughly how often you use the app, and which structural pieces (an account, a category) a given transaction connects to, without knowing what any of them actually are.

Your login email is also visible to us, the same as with any app that uses a real sign-in.

An admin-only way to take a full snapshot of the household — every account, transaction, category, budget, and project — and get back to it later if something goes wrong.

Taking a backup

"Back Up Now" saves a backup on the device it is run on, encrypted with your household's own Recovery Key — the same key that unlocks your data on every device. Havnest Money never sees that key and can't recover a backup without it, so keep your copy of it somewhere safe. Use "Export to Files" afterward to move a copy somewhere off the device too (in its encrypted bundle state).

Restoring

Restore from a backup already made on this device, or from an exported file elsewhere. Restoring overwrites the household's current data with whatever's in that backup, so it's something to do with caution and awareness.