Creating a New Document

The first thing that you'll need to do after installing MoneyWell is to set up your document. When MoneyWell launches, you'll see a "Welcome to MoneyWell" window giving you three options:

1. Open a Sample Document
2. Start a New Document
3. Learn How to Use MoneyWell

Since you're already here learning how to use MoneyWell, you don't need to worry about the third choice and the Sample document is mainly for trying MoneyWell before purchasing the full package, so let's click on Start a New Document.

A new document window will appear and ask you to give your new MoneyWell document a name to save it. You can also pick where to store your document at this point. If you aren't sure where to put it, your Documents folder is a great spot. Click Save to store your new document.

A "New Document Setup" panel will appear giving you two options:

1. Import Accounts
2. Use New Account Guide

If you have used a personal finance app and have exported your transaction history to one or more QIF files, you can choose Import Accounts to import your existing banking activity and you'll have a fully populated document (see Importing Transactions for more details about the import process).

Let's assume you don't have any information to import and you want to create your document from scratch.

Create Your First Account

Click Use New Account Guide to bring up the "New Account" panel. If you have Direct Connect Banking enabled for your account, MoneyWell can discover your accounts automatically. If you want to download transactions from your bank's website or manually enter them, you don't have to pick a financial institution. Just leave the "No Financial Institution" choice selected.

To select your financial institution you can scroll through the list or type some part of the name to filter the list to a smaller subset, then follow the steps below.

Direct Connect:

1. Enter your username and password (skip this step to add an account manually)
2. Click Continue
3. When the account list appears, you can optionally click accounts to unselect ones you don't need
4. Click Continue to save your account(s) and download recent transactions

MoneyWell will download any available transactions from your bank. If there are transactions that are not available to be downloaded, MoneyWell will set an initial balance transaction to account for the older transactions.

Web Connect or Manual:

1. Click Continue without enter any username or password.
2. Click the "Type" pop-up to change the type.
3. Set the Name (it should be unique)
4. Set the Balance and As Of values (see below for details).
5. Set other account values (see the full list below).
6. Click Continue to save your account

You can set the following values while manually creating an account:

• Type - The choices are checking account, savings account, credit card, loan/line of credit, investment account, cash account, and money market account.
• Name - This is the name you give to the account. It should be descriptive enough for you to identify the account.
• Balance - You can enter the initial bank balance. Pick the balance prior to any transaction activity you will be adding to MoneyWell.
• As Of - You can enter the date of the initial bank balance. This date should be the day before any other transactions in your account.
• Currency - Sets the default register currency for every transaction in that account. It also drives the currency formatting for the accounts list and reports.
• Memo - You can enter a note for informational purposes.
• Routing # - The routing number for your bank.
• Account # - The account number. The "Routing #" and "Account #" values are only necessary if you are using direct connect banking or if you download QFX or OFX files from your bank's web site.

Categorizing Your Transactions

Once you have one or more accounts, you can start categorizing your transactions by assigning them to buckets. Before you build your budget, it's good to know your historic spending.

You can quickly set the bucket on more than one transaction at a time by selecting them and dragging them to bucket.

Once you have a clean, categorized list of transactions, you can set up your budget.