Xfin

How to use Xfin

Everything below is how the app actually behaves, not a wishlist.

Xfin has one job: show what is actually left after the bills that are coming and the money your goals are holding. Everything in this guide exists to make that one number true. Setup takes about fifteen minutes, and you can stop after step two and still get most of the value.

On this page

1. Getting your accounts in

Xfin offers three ways in, and the order on screen is deliberate — the conversational one comes first, because it needs no bank login at all.

  1. Tell me what you have Say “Scotia checking, $2,400” and Fin sets it up. No form, no login. You can add or correct anything later the same way.
  2. Sync your bank Opens Plaid, which is the same connection layer your other finance apps use. You sign in on Plaid’s own screen — Xfin never sees your username or password, and the access is read-only. Available in the US and Canada.
  3. Import a statement Upload a statement and Fin reads the transactions out of it. Despite the “PDF” wording on the first-run screen, CSV works too. Useful for a bank Plaid does not reach.

There is a fourth, quieter option if you prefer typing: Add manually with a form, which asks for account type, name, balance, and optionally credit limit, APR, minimum payment and institution.

Connecting a bank is the step most likely to go wrong — expired connections, banks that challenge every session, the browser handoff that does not come back. Connecting your bank covers who Plaid is, what we can and cannot see, and what to do about each of those.

You can skip this entirely. The setup screen has a Skip for now link, and the app works with zero accounts — you just have nothing to forecast against yet.

2. Confirming your income

Xfin does not ask how often you get paid. It watches your deposits and works it out, which is why this step is a confirmation rather than a form.

Detection needs roughly two paycheques to land before a pay cycle is available. Until then you will see “Pay cycle becomes available after we see ~2 paychecks land in your accounts.” It recognises weekly, every two weeks, twice monthly, monthly, quarterly and yearly patterns, and it tolerates variable amounts, so hourly, overtime and commission pay still get picked up.

  1. Open the Income tile on Cash Flow It reads Confirm paycheck, or Did your pay land? when something is expected.
  2. Pick the deposit that is your pay Each row shows the amount, how often it repeats, and when the next one is due. Tap the one that anchors your month.
  3. Confirm it on payday On the day it is due, Xfin sends a notification asking “Did your paycheck land?” You can confirm straight from the notification without opening the app. If you ignore it, it asks again a few days later rather than silently giving up.

What confirming actually does. Picking your paycheque anchors your pay cycle — it is what makes “until next payday” mean something and lines the forecast up with your real month. It is not the same as the money entering your reserve; income counts toward the reserve once Xfin is confident in the pattern, or once you have entered it yourself.

To add income by hand, open Manage income and tap Add income manually. The fields are amount, name, how often (just this once, weekly, every two weeks, or monthly), the date you next expect it, and which account it lands in. One limitation worth knowing: a twice-monthly paycheque can be detected from your bank, but the manual form does not offer that option — it has the four above.

3. Setting up recurring bills

This is the step that changes your number the most. A bill Xfin has merely noticed does not reduce anything. A bill you have confirmed comes out of your reserve before you can spend it twice.

Detection reads your transaction history and looks for a repeating merchant. In practice you need about three charges spanning three weeks before something is confident enough to be suggested — two charges make a pattern but not a reliable one, and Xfin would rather stay quiet than guess.

  1. Open the Bills tile When something is waiting it reads 2 to confirm, otherwise the total upcoming.
  2. Work through “Looks recurring” Each suggestion has a Confirm button. You can also swipe a bill right to confirm it, or left to remove it. With three or more waiting you get a one-at-a-time reviewer that asks “Is this a recurring bill?” with Yes, recurring, Not recurring and Skip for now.
  3. Add anything it cannot see Set up a bill manually asks for type (bill, credit card payment or loan payment), amount, name, how often, the first due date, and which account it is paid from.

When a bill comes due, Xfin asks whether it actually happened: Yes, same amount, Different amount, or Didn’t happen. Answering keeps the schedule honest instead of letting it drift. On a bill you no longer want counted, the options are Mark Paid, Skip this month, Archive and Remove — archiving hides it but leaves the rule alive, so the next charge re-detects it.

4. Categories, and fixing them

You never have to categorise from scratch. Bank transactions arrive already sorted, and anything you type or tell Fin gets a sensible guess. Your job is only to correct what is wrong.

  1. Open a transaction and tap its category The picker opens straight from the detail card — you do not need to enter an edit mode. There is a search box, and a Create custom category option at the bottom.
  2. Save it as a rule when asked Change a category on a bank transaction and Xfin offers: “Always categorize ‘Merchant’ as ‘Category’?” Choosing Save rule updates past matches and every future import. Choosing Just this one changes only that row.
  3. Clear the review queue The Spending tile shows a count to review. Each row asks what it is — Income, Transfer or Spending. Income and Transfer resolve on the spot; Spending opens the picker, because an expense needs a category before it means anything.

Committed and Flexible

Every category sits in one of two buckets. Committed is the can’t-trim end — rent, mortgage, insurance, utilities, loan payments. Flexible is day-to-day money you can actually steer, and it includes subscriptions, because a subscription recurs but you can cancel it.

Xfin assigns the bucket for you. To move one, open the category and tap the row that says where it currently sits — it will ask you to confirm the move. Your choice overrides the automatic one from then on.

5. Easing back a category

This is Xfin’s answer to budgeting, and it is deliberately not a budget. There are no dollar budgets in the app at all. Ask Fin to “budget $500 for groceries” and it will decline and offer this instead.

A focus is a category you have chosen to ease down, measured against your own usual month rather than someone’s idea of a normal one. It is a direction, not a cap — nothing is blocked when you pass it.

  1. Open the category from the Categories tab Focus is only offered on Flexible categories. An ease-down target on rent would be meaningless, so the option does not appear there.
  2. Pick how much Four presets: 5% less, 10% less, 15% less, 20% less. Tapping one sets it immediately — there is no confirm sheet. The card tells you what that works out to: “10% less than your usual ~$420/mo · aiming for ~$378/mo”.
  3. Or set a flat monthly amount If the category has no history to measure against, Xfin says so and asks for an amount instead — a percentage off nothing is not a target.

From then on the category reports where it stands: ahead of target, on track, over pace, or well over. A brand-new focus on a quiet category reads watching · baseline building until there is enough to judge — that is normal, not a fault. If you drift over, Fin raises it once with a note about what easing back would buy you, and offers to talk it through.

Start with one. The whole point of a focus is that it is sustainable, which is why the presets start at 5% and Fin suggests around 10% rather than a heroic cut. Hold it for a month, then ratchet.

6. Goals that hold real money

A goal in Xfin is not a wish with a progress bar. Money you have put toward a goal leaves the figure you spend against — that is the point of it. Your reserve subtracts what is already saved into your goals, so a growing goal makes your spendable number smaller, which is exactly what saving feels like when it is real.

Set one up from the Goals tab, or just tell Fin: “save $5k by December”. A debt payoff is a goal too — “pay off my visa” creates one, and debt goals are tracked separately from savings so they do not distort the reserve.

If a card has no interest rate on file, Xfin will say the payoff date leaves interest out rather than inventing a rate. You can add the APR to get an accurate one.

7. What you can say to Fin

Fin is the assistant inside Xfin. It reads your figures and answers in them, and it can set things up for you. Everything below is something the app genuinely handles — these are drawn from the app’s own examples, not invented for this page.

Logging what you spent

Setting up income and bills

Accounts

Goals and debt

Spending

Questions, with no action attached

What happens when you ask

Four things are written immediately, because asking twice for them is friction with no payoff: logging a transaction, adding a recurring bill, adding recurring income, and adding a manual account. Everything else — creating a goal, setting a focus, changing or deleting anything — shows you a card first with a button naming exactly what it will do. Deletions ask twice.

Fin will not claim it did something it did not. There is a layer whose only job is to strip a completion claim out of any reply where the write did not actually happen.

Fin cannot move money. There is no transfer, payment or account-number capability anywhere in the app, and bank access through Plaid is read-only. Fin records and organises; it never moves. It is also not a financial advisor, and the app says so under every answer.

There is a fair-use allowance on the assistant that resets at the start of each month, and a short cool-off if you fire off a lot of messages at once. Normal use will not meet either.

8. Reading the reserve

Your home screen shows one number. It is your cash, plus income landing inside the window, minus the bills landing inside it, minus what your goals are already holding.

The chips beside the number switch it between Current, 15 days and 30 days. That is the whole choice on the home screen — it used to offer more and was cut back on purpose, because two windows are enough to see the shape of a month and more just invited fiddling.

Settings goes deeper if you want it: Adjust → Buffer window offers weekly, biweekly, monthly, until next payday, or a custom number of days, and there is a separate setting for which day your month starts, if your month starts on payday rather than the 1st.

Two rules make the number trustworthy. Income counts when it lands, never when it is merely expected — a paycheque coming Friday does not inflate today. And Xfin will never tell you what is “safe to spend”; it tells you what is planned, what is not, and what is left. Whether that is safe is yours to decide.

Where to go next

Questions and answers covers the things people ask once they are set up. If something here does not match what you see in the app, tell us — we would rather fix the guide than leave it wrong.

Related: can I afford it? · how long will it take to save? · about Xfin