Setting Up MoneyWell Banking

Welcome

Thanks for volunteering to help test out our new Plaid integration and/or iOS version of MoneyWell.

The main change on Mac is the integration with Plaid to allow downloading of transactions from supported institutions. On iOS, we have a completely rewritten app, which is more fully features as well as the Plaid integration.

To download the app(s) you'll need to have TestFlight installed on any devices you want to use and accepted the invite you received via e-mail.

Known Issues

• Multiple logins to the same institution: If you have multiple logins required to access different accounts with the same institution, you may encounter issues or one account not downloading transactions. This should be fixed in the next update, but expect a small amount of wonkiness until all 3 versions (Mac, iOS and the backend) all get into sync again as we don't have much control over the timing of releases via TestFlight.
• Pending transaction statuses. The latest update should improve the situation but I'm continuing to make improvements. There will also be an option to ignore pending transactions completely and only download cleared transactions.
• Merging transactions. MoneyWell's duplicate merging isn't yet optimized for Plaid downloads. I'm working on it
• iOS Duplicate detection. This doesn't exist yet. I'm working on it.
• Spending plan migration: There are a few issues that can occur when migrating from the old spending plan to the new.

Pricing

For the beta test, you'll have full access to everything without a subscription. When we launch the full version, the existing subscription will not have access to the banking data. To get the banking data, you'll need a MoneyWell+ subscription which will be $69.99 instead of the $49.99 for standard MoneyWell. Again, any feedback on this pricing is welcome. It's not an add-on, so you'll choose between MoneyWell standard (the current subscription) or MoneyWell+ which includes banking.

In return for your help and valuable feedback during the testing period, we'll be contacting you at the end of the beta test with a "thank you".

MoneyWell Accounts

To manage Plaid institutions, you'll need a "MoneyWell Account". This account is necessary because of the way Plaid authenticates you with your bank. All Financial data is still only stored on your devices. The server is just used as an intermediate step when downloading transactions, and no transactions or other financial information is stored on our server.

In the full release of MoneyWell, you'll be limited (initially) to 10 institutions, but will be able to add as many accounts with those institutions as you wish. This is related to how we're charged by Plaid. We're interested in any feedback you have on this number and whether you feel it would work for you and if not, whether you'd be prepared to pay a slightly higher cost to access additional institutions.

You can create or sign into your MoneyWell Account in Settings -> Account on Mac and Settings ->

When you initially create the account, you'll get an e-mail asking you to verify your account. The account is shared across multiple budgets, so if, for example you have multiple budgets which fetch.

Adding Institutions in MoneyWell

Once you've created a MoneyWell account, you'll be able to setup your institutions. Once you've added an institution, you'll be able to add as many accounts as you have with that institution.

You'll need to add the accounts in the Settings -> Banking screen before linking them to either existing accounts, or adding them to new accounts.

To add an additional account from an existing institution or to remove one, select "Modify" next to the institution you require.

To add a new account from a new institution, you'll need to click the "Add" button.

You will need to select the institution from the list and then follow the steps to authenticate with your institution. It's difficult for us to provide specific details as every institution will vary.

Use the "Disconnect" button to remove an institution entirely.

You can add / edit bank accounts account in MoneyWell in the normal way, by double-clicking on an existing account, or using the + button at the bottom of the sourcelist, but the account screen has been redesigned to accommodate the extra options. You can select the account you wish to link from the drop down list when adding an account.

For this initial release, it's not possible to link an online account within MoneyWell for iPhone, but if you've created one on Mac it should be possible to download transactions via iOS as long as you're signed in to the same MoneyWell account on your phone

Transactions will be downloaded either on an account basis or for all linked accounts via the "Direct Download" button in the toolbar.

Syncing and Shared Budgets

If you have a synced budget, you'll need to sign in to your new MoneyWell account on any devices you wish to download transactions from. Once signed in, MoneyWell will automatically check for new transactions for those linked accounts. If you share a budget with someone else, if you want them to be able to download transactions via Plaid on their devices too, for now, you'll need to share your MoneyWell account with them. If you choose not to, they'll still get the data which you download and sync, but they won't be able to download new transactions themselves.

MoneyWell for iPhone

If you use MoneyWell Express with your budget, you'll also need to install the beta version of MoneyWell iOS. This is a completely written app which provides 90% functionality of the Mac version on your phone, including the Plaid integration. We know that finding options and settings in iOS apps because of the limited screen space and lack of platform defaults (unlike the Mac) can make things tricky, so if you feel like you can't find options or things are not obvious or difficult to use, please let us know so that we can figure out how to make it better

Bugs

There will invariably be some bugs that you hit. We apologies in advance, but by installing these beta versions of MoneyWell, you need to know that this can happen, and (hopefully rarely) could lead to data loss. For that reason, we strongly advise you to make regular backups of your data. Unfortunately it's not possible to have multiple versions of MoneyWell for Mac installed at once to allow parallel budgets, but MoneyWell will only upgrade budgets that you open, so if you create a duplicate of your main budget, as long as you don't open the original with the new version, you'll be able to roll back to the App Store version of MoneyWell and open that original budget. Unfortunately any budget you do open with the new version will be upgraded and no longer be openable with the App Store version.

Questions

If there's anything that I haven't covered, or you need help or any further discussions, please get in touch via support@moneywell.app and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.