Using Moola
Transactions
Categories, filters, merchant rules, and spending charts.
Transactions holds every transaction from your linked accounts, categorized and editable. Manual accounts do not have transactions.
Where they come from
Linked institutions send transactions through Plaid. At link time Moola asks for a year of history and keeps loading until it has up to 13 months where the bank offers it. New transactions arrive when the bank reports them, usually within minutes, and on every refresh.
Amounts follow the bank's view: spending is money out, income and refunds are money in.
Categories
Each transaction is filed into one of Moola's categories, mapped from the bank's own classification:
Income · Transfers · Housing · Food & drink · Groceries · Shopping · Transportation · Travel · Entertainment · Health · Personal care · Services · Bills & utilities · Loan payments · Fees · Giving & taxes · Other
Transfers between your own accounts are filed so they do not count as spending or income.
Editing a transaction
Click any row to:
- Recategorize it.
- Add a note.
- Exclude it from totals, for a one-off you do not want in the charts.
- Always file this merchant as… to create a rule.
Merchant rules
A rule says "every transaction from this merchant goes in this category". Creating one re-files past matches and applies to everything that syncs later. Rules are yours alone; in a family workspace each member's rules apply to their own transactions.
Finding things
- Periods: this month, last month, 30, 90 days, year to date, 12 months, or all time.
- Filters by type (money in, money out), account, category, and in a family workspace, member.
- Search across merchant names and notes.
- Sortable columns and pagination for long lists.
Charts
Six views of the filtered set:
| Chart | Shows |
|---|---|
| By category | Spending split by category; click a bar to filter |
| Over time | Weekly or monthly totals |
| Top merchants | Where the most money went |
| By account | Spending per account |
| By member | Spending per person (family workspaces) |
| Cash flow | Money in against money out |
Money out is drawn in a colour that is neither the green of "up" nor the rose of "owed", so it reads as what it is.