Getting Started
Welcome to Artisan Money! This guide will help familiarize you with the application and get you started managing your finances.
1. Verify Your Email
- After signing up you'll receive an email asking you to verify your email address.
- Click the link in the email to verify your account.
2. Connect Your Accounts
- After you've verified your email you'll be directed to the Accounts page.
- Click the blue ”+ Add Account” button to connect your bank, credit cards, and investment accounts
Security Note: Artisan Money uses industry-standard encryption and never stores your bank credentials. All connections are read-only and secured through MX, our trusted financial data provider.
3. Fill In your Account Information
- Navigate to the Profile page
- You'll see a section titled ”Account Information”. Take a second to enter this information, try to be as accurate as you can.
4. You're all set!
Artisan Money is now ready to help you manage your finances. You can now navigate around the application and start exploring the features.
Dashboard
The dashboard provides an overview of your finances. Here's what you'll find:
Quick View Widgets
Net Worth
Your net worth is the total value of your assets minus your liabilities.
Debt-To-Income (DTI) Ratio
- The DTI ratio is a measure of your debt relative to your income. It helps you understand your financial health and ability to manage debt.
- A DTI ratio of 35% or less is considered healthy.
Cashflow
This shows how much money you've made (or lost) this month.
Historical Snapshot Chart
This chart tracks your net worth, cashflow and debt over time. The longer you use Artisan Money the more useful this chart will become.
Pro Tip: You can click the chart's legend to hide or show the corresponding data.
Asset Allocation Chart
This chart displays your asset allocation by category. It helps you understand how your money is distributed across different asset classes.
Accounts
All of your connected accounts are displayed here, grouped by their account type. Each row displays the current balance, 7-day historical value and the institution it belongs to.
Click on any account row to view detailed information and a graph showing the account's balance history.
Pro Tip: To hide an account from Artisan Money you can toggle the switch at the bottom of the account dialog. This will prevent the account from being factored into net worth, budgeting and cashflow calculations.
Managing Connections
There are two different types of accounts: online and offline.
- Online accounts are connected by your financial institutions and are managed by Artisan Money.
- Offline accounts are manually added to Artisan Money and changes must be applied by you.
If a connection to one of your financial institutions becomes impaired, you'll see a red alert on the affected institution. Common reasons for impaired connections include:
- Expired credentials
- Multi-factor authentication required
- Institution maintenance
Fixing Connections
To fix an impaired connection, simply click on "Fix Issues" button for that institution and follow the prompts to update your credentials or complete any required authentication steps.
Account Details
Clicking on an account reveals additional information including:
- Account number (partially masked)
- Historical balance graph
- Account type and status
- Connection health indicators
You can also edit available account details using the same dialog window.
Transactions
The transactions page provides a powerful interface to manage and analyze all your financial transactions in one place. You can quickly search, filter, and perform bulk operations on your transactions.
The table view displays key transaction details including date, description, amount, account, and any assigned budget categories or notes.
Pro Tip: You can export your filtered transactions to Excel to use in other applications.
Search and Filter
The powerful search functionality allows you to filter transactions by:
- Date range
- Transaction description
- Amount range
- Budget category
- Account
All filters can be combined to create precise transaction views, and the results update instantly as you modify your search criteria.
Bulk Operations
When multiple transactions are selected, you can perform several operations in bulk:
- Assign or update budget categories
- Hide transactions from cashflow and analysis
- Add or edit transaction notes
- Export selected transactions to Excel
Quick Analysis
The summary panel automatically updates to show the total income and expenses for your current selection, helping you quickly analyze specific transaction groups.
Rules
Rules are an optional tool in Artisan Money that lets you take total control of transactions as they get imported into the system. Rules automatically apply your specified actions to matching transactions, saving you time and ensuring consistency in your financial tracking.
Pro Tip: Rules are processed in the order they were created, so more specific rules should be created before general ones to ensure they take precedence.
Rule Actions
When a transaction matches your rule criteria, you can automatically:
- Assign specific budget categories
- Hide transactions from cashflow calculations
- Change the transaction type
- Receive email alerts
Future Enhancements
We're continuously working to expand rule capabilities. Stay tuned for additional features and automation options coming soon.
Budgets
The budgets page is your central hub for planning and tracking your monthly finances. When you first join Artisan Money, we create starter budgets based on common categories to help you get started quickly.
As you use the system, Artisan Money learns from your spending patterns and can automatically categorize new transactions, making budget management increasingly effortless over time.
Pro Tip: You can use the pre-made budgets as templates while creating your own custom categories that better match your financial needs.
Visual Insights
Understanding your spending patterns is made easy with interactive charts that break your down monthly expense and income distribution by category
Budget Performance
Stay on track with your financial goals through our comprehensive budget tracking system that shows:
- Planned vs. actual income
- Planned vs. actual expenses
- Real-time cashflow analysis
Smart Budgeting
Our budgeting system learns from your transaction history to automatically categorize new transactions, making budget maintenance easier and more accurate over time.
Cashflow
The cashflow page provides a detailed analysis of your income and expenses over your selected time period. This helps you understand where your money is coming from and where it's going.
Cashflow Overview
The overview section displays a chart with your history for the past 6 months as well as key metrics including:
- Total income for the selected period
- Total expenses for the selected period
- Net cashflow (income minus expenses)
- Cashflow rate (percentage of income saved)
Pro Tip: A positive cashflow rate indicates you're saving money, while a negative rate means you're spending more than you earn.
Category Breakdown
Similar to the budgets page, transactions are organized into categories, showing you:
- Income sources by category
- Expense categories and their totals
- Percentage of total income/expenses for each category
- Month-over-month category comparisons
Goals
This page allows you to logically divide your savings into separate buckets to be used for funding goals. It's important to note that Artisan Money does not actually move your money here, rather it helps you organize your funds to make sure you're properly dividing it between various goals.
Setting Up Goals
To start funding goals, you'll need to:
- Navigate to the Accounts page
- Select the account(s) you want to use for goals
- Open the account details
- Enable the "Use for goals" switch
Pro Tip: Your available funds for goals will automatically update to include the total balance of all accounts marked for goals.
Managing Goals
Once you've set up your accounts for goals, you can:
- Create new savings goals with target amounts
- Make contributions to your goals from available funds
- Track progress towards each goal
- Receive notifications when goals are fully funded
Profile
The profile page is where you can manage your account settings and subscription details.
Account Information
You can update your personal information including:
- Email address
- Name
- Financial details
Pro Tip: Keeping your Total Monthly Debt Payments, Net Monthly Income and Gross Yearly Income up to date helps Artisan display an accurate DTI ratio on the dashboard.
Subscription Management
View and manage your subscription details, including:
- Current subscription plan
- Payment method information
Updating Payment Method
To update your payment method, click the "Update Payment" button and enter your new card information. Your subscription will automatically continue with the new payment method.
Account Cancellation
If you need to cancel your account locate the Subscription Information section and click the red "Cancel My Account" button.
Note that your data will be immediately deleted from our servers in order to protect your privacy.
If you have any issues with your account or subscription, our support team is always available to help at support@artisan.money.