User manual

Everything hold. can do, in the order you are likely to need it. Skim the contents, or jump straight to the section you need.

Last updated September 2026. If something here does not match what you see in the app, tell us at support@holdmy.app and we will fix the page.

What's new

• September 2026. This manual: a tighter setup section, a search box in the contents, Premium badges on the sections that need the paid plan, and a feedback link under every section.

Getting started

What the app does

hold. is a personal finance app for your phone. You tell it where your money lives, you log what you spend, and it shows you where it went and what is left.

It does not connect to your bank. You enter your account balances yourself and log purchases as you make them, or photograph the receipt and let the app read it. Nothing is pulled from a bank feed, and no bank credentials are ever asked for.

Creating your account

On the welcome screen you can sign up three ways:

• Continue with Apple, on iPhone and iPad
• Continue with Google, on any device
• Email and password, using the form below the social buttons

Passwords need at least 8 characters with a lowercase letter, an uppercase letter, and a digit.

If we ask you to confirm your email address, type the code from the email or just tap the link in it. You can request a new code once a minute.

Setting up

Setup is seven short steps. Most can be skipped, and every answer can be changed later in Settings. Two of them deserve a moment's thought:

• When your month starts. The 1st, or your payday if you would rather your budget month follow your salary.
• Your monthly budget. Split your income between spending and saving, and the spending side becomes your monthly limit. You can skip this and create a budget later.

The rest covers your name, what you want to focus on (which shapes the tips you see later), your currency and income, and your accounts, where the first one you add becomes your default. Notifications start off and your phone is only asked for permission when you turn one on. The last step shows what Premium adds, and continuing for free is always an option.

If a partner invited you before you signed up, you will see their invitation first and can join their household right there.

Your first steps

After setup the dashboard shows a short checklist: set up a budget, add an account, log your first transaction. Each row links straight to the screen that finishes it, and the list disappears once all three are done.

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Finding your way around

The tabs

The bar floating at the bottom holds four tabs and one button:

• Dashboard, your balances and this month at a glance
• Transactions, everything you have logged
• Plan, your budgets and goals behind a Budgets or Goals switch
• Analytics, five charts you swipe between

The + button in the middle changes with the tab you are on. On the Plan tab it offers a new budget or a new goal. Everywhere else it offers a new transaction or a receipt scan.

The top bar

The title of most screens is the month you are looking at. Tap it to pick another month, or to choose a custom date range. A clear button appears while a custom range is applied.

To the right of the title:

• Holdy, on Dashboard and Plan, opens the assistant
• The bell opens your activity feed
• Your avatar opens Settings

The dashboard

From top to bottom:

• Balance cards. A deck you swipe through: net worth first, then one card per account. Tap a card to expand it for assets and debts, the change since last month, this month's income and spending, and a balance chart.
• Spent and earned this month. Tap either to open Transactions filtered to it.
• Your pinned budgets, with a bar broken down by category.
• Insights. Short cards when something is worth knowing, such as a budget getting close to its limit. Swipe one away to snooze it.
• Spending pace, how fast this month is going compared to usual.
• Recent transactions.

Pull down on any of the main screens to refresh.

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Accounts

Adding an account

Go to Settings and tap Accounts, or use the add row inside any account picker. Give the account a name, pick a type, set its current balance, and choose an icon, a color, and its currency.

Types are bank, cash, savings, credit card, investment, and other. Apart from credit cards they only change the icon and the label, so pick whatever reads best to you.

Net worth

Once you have two or more accounts, a Net worth card leads the deck on the dashboard. It adds up every account, converting currencies where it needs to, and includes money you are holding in goals. It is not an account itself, so it never shows up in pickers.

Credit cards

A credit card holds what you owe rather than what you have. Enter the amount owed as a positive number and the app shows it as Owed.

Two habits keep a card accurate:

• A purchase on the card is an expense on the card account.
• Paying the bill is a transfer from your bank into the card.

The first time you add a card the app explains this, so you do not end up logging the same spending twice. If a transfer clears the card completely, the app says so.

The default account

One account carries a star. New transactions start there, and scanned receipts are filed there. Receipt scanning will not start without one. Any account can be made the default from its edit screen.

Currencies

Each account has its own currency and every transaction is stored in the currency of its account. Totals that mix currencies are converted using daily exchange rates. Transfers between two accounts in different currencies are not allowed, so move money with an expense and an income instead.

Editing and deleting

Tap an account to edit it. Deleting asks what to do with its transactions: keep them, or remove them along with the account. Either way the account stops appearing in pickers.

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Logging money

Adding a transaction

Tap + and choose Add transaction, then enter the amount and set what applies:

• Type. Expense, income, or transfer. Switching type clears the category, since categories belong to one side or the other.
• Category. Your four most-used subcategories sit in a row, with More for the full searchable list. Picking a subcategory sets its parent category for you.
• Account and date. Two tiles. The date tile reads Today by default.
• Merchant and note. Merchants you have used before appear as suggestions. Merchants are for expenses.
• Exclude from budget. For one-offs you do not want counted, such as a reimbursement.
• Make recurring. Turn it on and pick a cadence: daily, workdays, weekly, monthly, the 1st of the month, the last of the month, or yearly.

If you share with a partner, a Private or Household switch decides whether they can see this one. If you have a goal, transfers get a Counts toward row for tagging the transfer to it.

Recurring transactions

A recurring transaction is a template. Each time it comes due, a copy is created for you with the same amount, category, and account, so a subscription or a rent payment lands without you doing anything. Copies carry a repeat marker in the list.

Deleting the template stops future copies. Copies already created stay where they are. To change a cadence, edit the original rather than one of its copies.

Editing, deleting, and details

Tap any row to see its details, including the recurrence and its next occurrence. From there you can edit everything: amount, category, account, date, merchant, note, visibility, and recurrence. Deleting asks you to confirm.

You can edit your own transactions. A transaction your partner shared with you is read-only, the same way yours are for them.

Finding a transaction

The Transactions tab gives you three ways to narrow the list:

• The month title, for a month or a custom range
• Search, which matches merchants, notes, and category names in your language
• Filters, for whose it is, income or expenses, one or more categories, and a minimum or maximum amount

Active filters appear as chips above the list, and each chip removes its own filter.

Categories

The app ships with a full set of categories and subcategories. You can tidy them from Settings, under Categories: one long list of everything, with a remove button on every row.

• Removing is free and reversible. It hides the row from pickers and suggestions without touching anything already filed under it, which keeps your history intact. Removed items live on their own screen and come back with one tap.
• Creating and renaming your own categories and subcategories needs Premium.
• Deleting is offered for your own custom rows, and only while nothing is filed under them. When something is, the app offers to hide it instead.

Whether a category is an expense or an income category is fixed when it is created. To move one to the other side, create a new one.

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Scanning receipts Premium

Part of Premium. A default account is required.

Taking the photo

Tap +, choose Scan receipt, then take a photo or pick images from your gallery. You can select several at once and they are processed together.

You are taken back to Transactions right away and a card shows the scan in progress. Everything else happens in the background, so you can keep using the app or close it.

What the scan produces

The app reads the text on your phone, then works out the merchant, the date, and the total, and sorts each line item into your own subcategories. The result is saved as one expense on your default account, with the whole itemized receipt attached.

When everything adds up, you get a short confirmation and nothing else is needed. When the items do not match the total, or something could not be categorized, the row gets a Needs review chip.

Reviewing a receipt

Tap the chip, or open the transaction and choose View receipt. The review sheet shows the photo, the merchant, the date and address, and every line item with its category. You can:

• Give a category to any item that did not get one
• Edit an item's name or amount, or add a missing one
• Change which account the receipt is saved to

Confirm and save writes your edits back to the transaction. Closing without confirming changes nothing, and the chip stays so you can come back.

When a scan does not work

A scan can fail: an unreadable photo, a picture that is not a receipt, or a problem on our side. Failed scans show a card in the list with Retry and Dismiss. Retry uses the photo you already took.

Scanning the same photo twice does not create a second transaction. Deleting a scanned transaction removes its card too.

A wrong merchant logo

Known merchants get their brand logo on the transaction row. If a logo is wrong, press and hold it in the transaction details and choose Report wrong logo. It disappears for you everywhere, with an undo if you tapped by accident.

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Budgets

A budget is a lens over your spending with a limit attached. Budgets are views, not wallets, so a purchase can count toward more than one and nothing is ever locked away.

The two kinds

• A monthly budget counts everything you spend in the month and resets when your month starts. You hold one at a time, on any plan. It is the budget setup creates for you.
• A trip or project has a start and an end date, no reset, and counts only the transactions you add to it. The first one is free and further ones need Premium.

Using a monthly budget

Open a budget from the Plan tab to see:

• What is left, over a progress bar with a marker showing how far through the period you are. Green means you are on pace, amber means you are heading for an overspend, red means you are over.
• Category caps. Optional limits inside the budget, for instance 300 for groceries. Add them from the detail screen.
• Untracked spending, what fell inside the budget but outside your caps.
• History, past periods against the limit.
• The transactions counted, where you can swipe one out of the budget without touching the transaction itself.

The month title on the detail screen browses previous periods. Editing the name, amount, or month start day is behind the menu in the top right.

Alerts and streaks

As a budget fills up, cards appear on your dashboard at 75 percent, at 90 percent, when you go over, and when your pace suggests you will. These are cards in the app, not phone notifications, and each one shows at most once per budget per period. Swiping one away hides it until the next period.

Months finished inside the limit build a streak, shown as a flame on the budget card. A broken streak resets to zero.

Pinning and archiving

Press and hold a budget card to pin it to your dashboard or to archive it. Pin as many as you like and they become a swipeable carousel. Archiving keeps the budget and its history, takes it out of the list, and frees up its slot. Budgets are never deleted, only archived.

On Android you can also add a home screen widget for your monthly budget, showing what is left and where it went.

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Goals

A goal is a box you save into: a target amount, an optional date, and a record of every contribution. One active goal is free, and further goals need Premium. Archiving a finished goal frees the slot.

Creating one

Plan tab, Goals, then +. Set the amount, name it, pick an icon and a color, and optionally add a target date. With a date, the app shows what you would need to put aside each month to arrive on time.

Putting money in

There are two ways, and they behave differently on purpose:

• Add money. Moves an amount out of one of your accounts and into the goal. The goal holds it. Your account balance drops, your net worth does not move, and the dashboard shows the money as saved rather than available.
• Tag a transfer. When you move money between your own accounts, for example into a real savings account, you can mark the transfer as counting toward a goal. The money stays in the destination account and the goal tracks the progress.

Either way, saving never makes your net worth dip. That is the point of the split you see on the dashboard: what you are worth, and what is free to spend.

Taking money back out

Release funds moves money the goal is holding back into an account you choose. You can release what you put in. On a shared goal, your partner's contributions stay theirs to release.

When your contributions pass the target, the app celebrates once and offers to release the money. You can keep saving past 100 percent, and the app tells you how far over you are. Afterwards you can archive the goal, which keeps its history.

Sharing a goal

A goal can be shared with your partner from its edit screen, once you have a household. A shared goal shows what each of you has contributed, side by side, with the last few months for each. There is no settling up on a goal. What you each put toward something you are saving for together is not a debt.

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Sharing with your partner Premium

Part of Premium for whoever sends the invitation. The person joining does not need their own plan, and one plan covers both of you.

How sharing starts

Sharing begins when you share a budget. That creates your household, which holds up to two people. You can also start from Settings, under Household, which asks which budget to share first.

Inviting your partner

Two ways, from Household settings:

• Send an invite by email. They get a link that opens the app or the website. The link is good for 14 days. You can resend once a minute.
• Create a code. A short code you can send however you like, good for 24 hours. Copy it from the invite card.

You can revoke an invitation at any time. Your partner sees a preview of what they are joining, including who invited them and what is shared, and nothing happens until they tap Join.

If they already have an account and their email matches, the invitation also appears in their own Household settings and in their notification bell.

What your partner can see

Only what you choose to share:

• Transactions you mark Household. Each transaction carries its own Private or Household setting, and you can change it later. Settings has a default so you do not have to think about it every time.
• Budgets and goals you share, and the spending counted in them.
• Your combined net worth, but only if you both switch it on in Household settings. It is one number per person, and either of you turning it off removes the card for both.

Your accounts and their balances are never shared. Neither are private transactions, private budgets, or private goals.

Your personal numbers stay personal too. The dashboard and analytics show your own activity, even for spending you shared. Analytics has a toggle that widens your own view to include household activity, which changes only what you see and gives your partner nothing.

Contributions

A shared monthly budget is sized by what each of you puts in. On the Together tab, each person sets their own contribution as a percentage of their income or as a fixed amount, and the budget total is the sum. You edit your own contribution, never your partner's, and they get a notification when it changes.

Splitting and settling up

The Together tab on a shared budget shows what each of you spent, side by side, with the categories you both spend on. Underneath is the combined total and who owes whom.

• By default, shared costs are split evenly. The owner of the budget can change the ratio, for example 60 and 40.
• One-off overrides. From a transaction in the budget's list you can mark it all yours, all theirs, or split it a different way.
• Settle up records that a payment happened between you. It is bookkeeping, so it does not create a transaction or move any balances. Balances carry across months until you settle them.

Leaving, removing, and stopping

• Stop sharing a budget from the budget's menu. It becomes private again and stays yours. If the split is unsettled, the app says so first.
• Leave the household from Household settings, or, if you created it, delete it there.
• Remove your partner to free the second seat.

When someone leaves, the budgets and goals they shared go back to being private to them, and the app tells you which ones before you confirm. Transactions that were already shared stay attributed to the period you shared them in. Nothing is deleted, and leaving is always free, even without Premium.

If Premium runs out

Sharing pauses instead of breaking. You each go back to your own view, nothing is deleted, and everything you both wrote is still there. Either of you starting Premium again resumes sharing and fills in the gap. Leaving, removing, and stopping sharing all stay available while paused.

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Analytics

Five cards you swipe between:

1. Where it went. Your spending by category as a ring, with each category opening up into its subcategories and showing the change from the period before.
2. Income and expenses, side by side per period, with the net underneath.
3. Account balances, as they stand right now. This card ignores the date range, and only ever shows your own accounts.
4. Top merchants, where your money goes most, with visit counts.
5. Recurring spend, subscriptions and repeating charges the app has spotted in your history, with the amount, how often, and when the next one is due. This card reads your whole history, not just the selected range.

The month title in the top bar is the one time control for the whole screen. Tap a category or subcategory to see the transactions behind it.

When some amounts could not be converted into your currency, because no exchange rate was available, the card leaves them out and marks the total as partial.

If you share with a partner, a button in the top bar switches between your own activity and your household's.

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Holdy, your assistant Premium

Part of Premium.

Holdy answers questions about your own numbers: how the month is going, where you spend most, how a budget compares with the last one. Open it from the Holdy button on the Dashboard or Plan tab, or from an insight card.

• Twenty messages a month, with the counter in the top bar. It resets on the 1st.
• Consent first. Before your first message, a sheet explains what leaves your phone: summaries of your balances, budgets, and spending. Never your password or any bank credential, because the app does not hold any.
• Your conversation stays on your phone. Clear it any time from the top bar.
• Holdy does not give financial advice, and says so under every conversation. It describes what your data shows, and the decisions stay yours.

Holdy replies in whichever of the seven app languages you are using.

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Insights and the monthly report

Insight cards

The cards on your dashboard cover budgets getting tight and other things worth a glance. Budget alerts are part of the free plan. With Premium you also get insights written from your own patterns, refreshed every couple of days. Swipe a card away to snooze it.

The monthly report

On the 1st of each month we email you a recap of the month just finished: what came in, where it went, how your budget did, what repeats every month, and how the year is adding up.

On the free plan the email carries the headline numbers, your top categories, and what is coming up, plus a preview of one of the things we noticed. With Premium the full report includes every finding and Holdy's written read of the month.

Every report email has an unsubscribe link in the footer.

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Medals and the Trophy Room

Medals mark habits over time: logging consistently, finishing months inside your budget, reaching goals. Each medal has bronze, silver, gold, and platinum tiers, and a couple are one-off.

Find them in Settings under Progress. Tap a medal for the full ladder, your progress toward the next tier, and the dates you earned each one.

Medals are never taken away, and the app works them out from what you already do. There is nothing extra to switch on or track.

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Notifications

What your phone can notify you about

• A daily nudge to log what you spent, at a time you choose. The default is 8 in the evening.
• Bill reminders, the day before a recurring expense is due, at 9 in the morning, for the next two weeks.
• Budget period ending, three days before your budget month rolls over, with what is left.
• Trial ending, two days before a free trial finishes.

A weekly summary is listed as coming soon and does not send anything yet.

Turn each of these on or off in Settings under Notifications. Your phone is only asked for permission when you switch one on. If you turned notifications off in your phone's settings, the app shows a banner with a shortcut back there.

The bell

The bell in the top bar is the in-app feed. It collects things that happened, not things you did: your partner logging shared spending or contributing to a shared goal, an invitation, someone joining or leaving, a budget being shared or unshared, a receipt finishing, a medal, and your monthly report being ready. Tapping a row takes you to what it is about.

Confirmations of your own actions appear as brief messages at the top of the screen instead, and they do not fill up the bell.

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Settings

Open Settings with your avatar in the top right.

Preferences

• Appearance. Light, dark, or follow your phone.
• Language. English, Spanish, German, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish, or follow your phone.
• Currency. The currency your totals are shown in.
• Balance history. How far back the dashboard chart goes: 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, or a year.

Your money

• Accounts, to add, edit, or remove them.
• Categories, to tidy the list and add your own.
• Focus, the goals you picked during setup.
• Transaction defaults, whether new transactions start private or shared, and whether they start excluded from budgets.
• Notifications, the switches described above.

Security

If your phone has Face ID or a fingerprint sensor, you can lock the app behind it. It locks when you open the app and again after five minutes in the background. It hides the app, it does not sign you out.

If you signed up with an email and password, you can unlock with your password when the sensor will not cooperate. If you signed in with Apple or Google, the options are to try again or sign out.

Separately, and whether or not the lock is on, the app covers itself with the launch screen when you switch apps, so your balances do not sit in your app switcher.

Account

Help and support opens an email to us. Log out signs you out and clears the app's local copy of your data from the phone.

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Premium

What Premium adds

• Receipt scanning, with every line item categorized
• Holdy, the assistant, with 20 messages a month
• Insights written from your own patterns, and the full monthly report
• Sharing with your partner, which also covers their plan
• Your own categories and subcategories
• More than one trip or project budget, and more than one goal

What the free plan includes

Logging, accounts, and the transaction list are not capped. Everyone gets one monthly budget, one trip or project, and one active goal, all five analytics cards, budget alerts, medals, and the headline monthly report. Archived budgets and goals do not count against the limits, so finishing one frees its slot.

A monthly budget is one per person on every plan, Premium included. A second one would compete with the first over the same spending, so the app opens the one you have instead.

Trials, billing, and canceling

Prices are shown at the moment you look, from the App Store or Google Play, in your own currency. If the plan you pick includes a free trial, the paywall shows how long it lasts and the date you would first be charged, and we send a reminder two days before it ends. Cancel before then and you are not charged.

Subscriptions are billed by Apple or Google, not by us. Manage or cancel yours in the App Store or Google Play subscription settings. Settings has a shortcut once you are subscribed. Restore purchases, at the bottom of the paywall, brings a plan back after a reinstall or on a new phone.

Canceling does not delete anything. You keep your data and everything the free plan includes.

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Your data, privacy, and deleting your account

Where your data lives

Your data is stored in our backend so it follows you across devices, and cached on your phone so the app opens instantly. The copy on your phone is encrypted, with the key held in your device's own secure storage.

The full terms and the privacy policy are on the Terms and Privacy page.

Using the app offline

Without a connection you can still open the app and read everything that had synced, including your transactions, budgets, goals, and categories. Adding and editing need a connection, and the app tells you when a change did not go through instead of pretending it did. Account balances need one successful sync before they show.

Deleting your account

Settings, at the bottom, under Danger zone. You can also start it at holdmy.app/delete-account if you cannot get into the app.

Deletion runs on a 30-day grace period:

• Signing in during those 30 days offers you a single screen with Cancel deletion on it.
• After 30 days your identity is destroyed. Your email address, name, and photo are removed, your sign-in stops working, and the address is free to sign up with again as a new account.
• If you are in a household, deleting your account also ends the sharing, so your partner is not left attached to an account that no longer exists.
• Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. Cancel that in the App Store or Google Play first.

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Troubleshooting

A receipt has been scanning for a long time

Scans finish in the background and survive closing the app. If one is stuck, the card turns into a failure after a while and offers Retry, which reuses the photo you already took.

The scan button will not start

Receipt scanning needs a default account, because that is where the receipt is filed. Set one from Settings, Accounts, then try again.

A total is marked as partial

Some of your transactions are in a currency with no exchange rate available right now, so they are left out of the total instead of being counted at the wrong value. The rest of the figure is accurate.

My partner's transaction is not showing

There is no need to leave the household or stop sharing a budget. Leaving makes the budgets and goals you shared private again, which is a bigger change than the one you are chasing.

Only transactions they marked Household cross over. Their private ones never do. If sharing is paused because a plan ran out, activity written during the pause appears once either of you starts Premium again.

I am not getting notifications

Check the switches in Settings, then check that your phone still allows notifications for the app. On Android, reminders also need the alarms and reminders permission to fire on time. Without it they still arrive, just not to the minute.

I forgot my password

Use Forgot password? on the log in screen. The email takes you into the app to set a new one. If you signed up with Apple or Google, there is no password to reset, so use the same button you signed up with.

The app is asking for Face ID and it will not work

If you signed up with an email and password, choose the password option on the lock screen. Otherwise sign out from that screen and sign back in.

My budget total changed on its own

On a shared budget the total is the sum of both contributions, so it moves when either of you changes theirs, or when income set to a percentage changes. The Together tab shows the current arrangement.

I want to tidy things up or start over

You almost never need to delete anything. Removing a category hides it and is reversible. Archiving a budget or a goal keeps its history and frees its slot. Reinstalling the app does not touch your data, which lives in your account, but it is rarely a fix either.

The one choice that does not come back is deleting an account and choosing to remove its transactions with it. If you are unsure, keep the transactions and let the account disappear from pickers on its own.

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Getting help

Email support@holdmy.app and we will get back to you, usually within 2 business days. It helps to include your device and OS version, the app version, and what you were doing when the problem happened.

See also Support, Terms and Privacy, and Delete account.

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