Getting Started with Monarch

Welcome to Monarch! We're glad you're here.

It can take a bit of time to fully set up your account in order to get overview of your finances, but it's worth it. Once your accounts have been connected, you can make a budget, create goals, track your net worth, and even collaborate with a household member! We're excited to be a partner in your path to a better financial future.

This document provides a guide for getting started with Monarch. Click on a topic to jump to that section in this guide:

• Connect Accounts
• Customize Categories 
• Create a Goal
• Create your Budget
• Further Customize

Note: We are in the process of updating our videos to match our new redesign! The colors may look different, but the overall processes shared in these videos remain the same.

Check out our video on getting started here:

This guide provides recommended steps to jumpstart your Monarch account, and includes links to our in-depth documentation as well as immediate tips.

When you first log in to your new Monarch account, you will be prompted to connect an account to begin exploring Monarch. Once you have connected your first account, you'll see a checklist of tasks to help you get started.

Connect Accounts

We recommend you connect as many accounts as you can before you start categorizing transactions, setting up rules or budgets. If you have a lot of accounts, start with your most-used banking and credit card accounts.

Add your accounts

• The Institutions Settings page lets you add accounts, refresh all accounts, edit the account names/type/subtype, hide accounts, hide balances or transactions, and delete or close accounts.

Choose your data provider

• If you are experiencing issues with the connection to your financial institution and want to try a connection with a different data provider, or if you have a preference between Plaid, MX, or Finicity, you can attempt to connect with a different data provider.

• Note: the option to choose a data provider is only available on the web.

What if I can’t connect to my account?

• We are monitoring our connections and are always working to improving users’ account experiences. If you are having trouble connecting or syncing your data, we provide troubleshooting steps. You can also try a different data provider, include an account as a manual account, or see if there's a known issue. 

Delete history

• The Data Settings page lets you delete all transactions or account balances across all accounts in Monarch before a date you specify. The most common reason to do this is to have a 'clean' start date, after which you know all your history is consistent across different accounts going forward.
• Note: Deleting transaction history or balance history permanently deletes this information and is not retrievable.

Refresh accounts

• If you are seeing missing transactions or an account hasn’t recently synced, it is recommended you navigate to your Institutions Settings page to force refresh your accounts. At the very top, you will be able to Refresh All.
• In each account, you can select the "..." to Update login settings if you need to update your login credentials with this institution.

Add transactions or merchants and deleting transactions

• If you visit the account page of any account you can find the Add Transaction option. This is located across from Transactions on web and under the three dots “…” at the top of the screen on mobile.
• When you select any transaction, you will see the delete transaction button.
• To add a custom merchant, you will need to first create a custom transaction. While creating this transaction you can then enter in your custom merchant name that will be usable for all future transactions.

Upload account balance history

• On your Accounts page, you can select the account to which you want to upload your account balance history. This is found under the account's "Edit" menu. This allows you to have a complete historical set of your data. 

Customize Categories

After categorizing your income, it's a good idea to review the default system categories and determine which ones to keep and which ones to disable - for example, the mortgage category might not be relevant to you if you rent, so you can turn that category off.

Customize your categories

• The Categories Settings page lets you create new groups, new categories, and organize the order of these groups and categories. Drag the group or category name to your desired location and this will be reflected in both web and mobile version.
• Note: If you are using flex budgeting, the order here will only affect your fixed and non-monthly buckets. The order of the flex bucket is based on the actual amount spent.

Organize your transactions with tags

• The Tags Settings page shows you all of the default and custom tags created in your household.
• Transactions can have multiple tags, but only one category. Tags can even span different transaction types, such as income vs. expenses vs. transfers.

Create a Goal

Set up your first goal

• Goals allow you create a prioritized list of future plans and use your account balances to track transactions and contributions.

Create your Budget

To set up a budget, the first step is to ensure that all your financial accounts are connected to Monarch and that transactions are accurately categorized. In particular, you should ensure that your income transactions are correctly categorized as paychecks, interest, bonuses, business income, etc. Since the budget is based on income, it's crucial to make sure these transactions are categorized correctly.

Monarch offers two types of budgeting: category budgeting (the traditional method) and flex budgeting (which allows you to focus on just one high-level flex number). To learn more about each type and determine which is best for you, check out our blog post: Flex vs. Category Budgeting: How to Choose What's Right for You.

You can change your budgeting setup from flex to category or vice versa (as often as you'd like) in the settings on the budget page.

Start budgeting

• Regardless of which method you select, your total budget for each month is based on how much income you expect to receive that month. Expenses and savings are subtracted from the income to create a balanced budget. Monarch budgets by rounding to the nearest dollar, and does not show exact cents.

Rollovers

• The default settings has your budget resetting each month.  However, at times, you may wish for balances (both surpluses and negatives) to carry into the next month. You can enable rollovers by clicking on the gear icon that appears next to a category name when you hover over it. 

Further Customization

Allow edits to pending transactions

• The Allow edits to pending transactions toggle in your settings will let you choose whether you want the ability to edit pending transactions or not. Note that if you edit a pending transaction, it's possible your edits will be lost once the final version of the transaction from your bank is posted.

Add members to your household

• It's free to add up to 5 people to your household. You'll each get your own login, but have the same level of visibility and access to manage accounts, transactions, and budgets. Each household has the same budget.
• You can invite a new household member to Monarch by clicking on the arrow next to your name on Monarch’s web version. Then go to "Members" and click "Add Member."
• Note: Each member you add will be able to see all of the connected accounts. There is no option to hide accounts or transactions. You will also still only have one Budget page - but you get creative with custom categories to distinguish each member’s budget!

Merge history to another account

• If for whatever reason you end up with duplicate accounts listed in Monarch that all point to the same account at your financial institution, you can merge the history of the accounts together to avoid duplication.

Customize your dashboard

Tip: The order of the cards and which ones are disabled are independent between the web and mobile app so you can have a different order on web vs mobile.