Help / Getting Started

Welcome to LedgerBear

LedgerBear is a personal finance app for keeping track of where your money is and where it's going. This page gives you the mental model so the rest of the help center makes sense.

The pieces

LedgerBear is built from six main concepts. Each one gets its own section in this help center, but here's the quick version:

  • Accounts are the buckets where your money lives — a checking account, a credit card, cash in a drawer. Every transaction belongs to exactly one account.
  • Transactions are the individual entries: a paycheck, a grocery run, a transfer to savings. You can type them in by hand or import a CSV from your bank.
  • Categories let you group transactions so you can see what you actually spend on (e.g., Food & Dining > Groceries). They come in three types: Expense, Income, and Investment.
  • Rules auto-categorize transactions based on their memo text. If every transaction whose memo starts with TRADER JOES should be categorized as Food & Dining > Groceries, a rule makes that happen automatically on import.
  • Reminders are recurring transactions — a monthly rent payment, a biweekly paycheck, a yearly insurance premium. LedgerBear uses them to project your future balance.
  • The cashflow forecast combines your current balances with your reminders to show where your accounts are heading. It's the point of the whole exercise.

Households

Everything you create lives inside a household. A household is your workspace — accounts, categories, rules, members. You can belong to more than one household (for example, a personal one and a shared one with a partner) and switch between them from your profile menu in the top-left.

A suggested reading order

If you're setting up LedgerBear for the first time:

  1. Skim A tour of the interface so the rest makes sense.
  2. Create your first account.
  3. Import some transactions to get recent history in.
  4. Create a few categories and optionally some rules so new imports sort themselves.
  5. Add reminders for recurring bills and paychecks — the forecast isn't useful until you do.

Once those are in place, the Cashflow dashboard starts earning its keep.