How to KalaWorth

The goal of your first session is one thing: give every dollar you currently have a purpose. Not a perfect plan — a true one.

1. 1Add your accounts. Enter them by hand with today’s balances, or import a CSV (guide 2). KalaWorth shows your total real cash at the top — that’s the money you’re working with. All of it exists; none of it is a guess.
2. 2Tag each account Personal or Shared. If it’s a joint account you run with a partner, tag it Shared. This one tap is what makes the household views work later.
3. 3Create your everyday categories. Start with the big five: Groceries, Transport, Bills, Eating Out, Fun Money. You can add, rename and reorganise later — don’t aim for perfect taxonomy on day one.
4. 4Add your annual categories. This is the KalaWorth difference. Add one category per big irregular bill: Car Rego, Insurance, Christmas, School Fees. Enter the yearly amount and when it’s due.
5. 5Move money until “Available to spend” hits zero. Fund the bills due soonest first, then everyday categories for the next few weeks, then goals. When available-to-spend reads $0, every dollar has a purpose — you’re budgeting.

KalaWorth works fully manually, and imports the transaction files your bank already gives you. This is the whole free plan — nothing is held back.

1. 1Manual entry. Add accounts with today’s balance and enter transactions by hand. Everything — budgeting, runway, dashboards, net worth — works exactly the same.
2. 2CSV upload. Export a statement from your bank’s website and drop it in. Every Australian bank formats its export differently, so KalaWorth is built to be flexible — map the columns once and it remembers your bank’s layout for next time.
3. 3Mix and match. Import some accounts, keep others manual. One household picture, however the data gets in.

Moving money is the whole discipline of cash control. Overspent on eating out? The money has to come from somewhere real — so you choose where. That choice is budgeting; everything else is bookkeeping.

1. 1Tap any category, then Move money.
2. 2Choose the source: available-to-spend, or another category with room.
3. 3Enter the amount and confirm. Both categories update instantly, and your history keeps a record of every move.

Every category wears a ring. The ring answers one question: how many months does the cash available in this category last at your current pace? You decide what “enough” means: in Settings, set a target number of months of cover you want to keep.

1. 1Turquoise — the category is at or above your target months of cover. Healthy. Nothing to do.
2. 2Coral — cover has dropped below your target and the category needs attention. Not an emergency, not a judgement: an early heads-up, while there’s still time to move money in or ease off.

The months figure next to the ring is the same number in words: “5.2 mo” means the cash available lasts about five months at your recent pace. Never red, never a siren — just turquoise for healthy and coral for “worth a look.”

The $800 rego bill isn’t a surprise — it comes every year. It only feels like a surprise inside a monthly budget. KalaWorth’s year view fixes this permanently.

1. 1Create a category for each irregular bill: rego, car and home insurance, school fees, vet, Christmas, annual subscriptions.
2. 2Enter the annual amount and the due month. KalaWorth spreads it into a funding pace that matches your pay cycle.
3. 3Fund it a little every pay. The category quietly fills; the dashboard shows it funded when the bill is fully covered — usually months before it’s due.

KalaWorth is built for households that manage money together — one picture, not a ledger of who owes whom. There are no 50/50 splits anywhere, on purpose.

1. 1Tag each account Personal or Shared (you did this in setup).
2. 2When you create a category, choose which money funds it. Rent and groceries from the joint account? Shared. Your hobbies? Personal. Shared money and personal money never blur into each other.
3. 3Use the view toggle — Combined / Personal / Shared — to see the whole household, just your money, or just the joint picture. Every number in every view is a real, whole balance.

Tax time is miserable because the sorting is left to July. KalaWorth moves the sorting to the moment of spending, where it takes one tap.

1. 1Flag a whole categoryif everything in it is work-related — a sole trader’s “Tools & equipment,” for instance. Every future transaction in it inherits the tag automatically.
2. 2Flag a single transaction anywhere, any time — one donation, one work purchase inside a personal category. A transaction’s own tag always wins over its category’s default.
3. 3Not sure how much is claimable — the phone bill, the home office? Mark it partial and check with your accountant. KalaWorth never invents a percentage for you.
4. 4In July, open Reports and export the clean list — amounts, dates, merchants, and every attached receipt — ready for your accountant or your own lodgment.

1. 1Open any transaction and add an attachment.
2. 2Snap the receipt (or pick it from your photos). It’s stored securely — the ATO expects records kept for five years, and a shoebox doesn’t back itself up.
3. 3Done. Tax-tagged transactions bundle their receipts into the export automatically — no separate collating step, ever.

Some spending isn’t a category that refills — it’s a one-off with a start, an end, and a target. That’s a Project. Savings Goals work the same way.

1. 1Create a Project or Goal: name, target amount, dates, funded from Personal or Shared money.
2. 2Add line items if you want detail — flights, accommodation, gifts, materials — or keep it as one pot.
3. 3Watch the ring. On a Project or Goal it shows how far you are from the target — how much you’ve put in versus how much you still need.
4. 4On a group trip, tag who paid per item so squaring up at the end is trivial. When it ends, KalaWorth closes it out with a wrap-up.

Decide once what happens to every pay — then let it happen. Pay yourself (and your goals) first, automatically, before the rest becomes spendable.

1. 1Go to Settings → income rules and add a rule.
2. 2Choose a category, then a fixed amount or a percentage of each pay — “10% of each pay to Investing,” “$50 to Holiday.”
3. 3When income lands, the rules run instantly and only the remainder shows as available to spend. Percentages are each taken from the full pay, so 10% + 10% on $1,000 is $100 + $100.

1. 1Add your non-cash accounts: credit cards, loans, mortgage, super, investments, even gift cards. Each has fields that fit what it is — limits and due dates for cards, rate and term for loans, expiry for gift cards.
2. 2For super and investments, update the balance monthly. Log contributions and withdrawals as transfers, and KalaWorth works out your genuine growth: what your investments earned, separate from what you added.
3. 3For your mortgage, split each repayment into interest, fees and principal — only the principal reduces the loan balance, so the payoff line is honest.
4. 4The Net worth dashboard shows assets minus liabilities, trended over the same month / year-to-date / rolling views as everything else.

The classic budgeting mistake: counting a purchase when you tap the card, then counting it again when you pay the card off. KalaWorth makes the right way the default way.

1. 1A card purchase is spending, immediately. A $5 coffee on the credit card debits your Coffee category the moment it happens — exactly like a debit purchase.
2. 2Paying off the card is a transfer, not spending. The money was already counted at the register, so nothing is ever counted twice.
3. 3The card’s account page tracks the balance owed, the limit, and the due date — the debt picture, kept separate from the spending picture.

Automatic bank feeds aren’t live yet — today you import a CSV or enter transactions by hand (guide 2), and everything else in KalaWorth works exactly the same. Here’s how connecting will work when it ships.

1. 1KalaWorth will use the Consumer Data Right — Australia’s government-regulated Open Banking system. You authorise your bank directly; KalaWorth never sees your password, credentials are never stored, and the connection is read-only by law.
2. 2You’ll be taken to a secure consent screen and then to your own bank’s login. You approve which accounts to share and for how long (up to 12 months).
3. 3Back in KalaWorth, tag each connected account Personal or Shared, and your recent transactions flow in.

The reason most budgets get abandoned is upkeep. This is the feature designed to take it off your plate — it isn’t in the app yet. For now, imported transactions are categorised as you review them, and the app remembers your CSV layout so the import itself stays quick.

1. 1Auto-categorise. New transactions will be sorted into categories automatically, getting sharper the more you confirm.
2. 2Your own rules. Prefer to be explicit? Create rules by description — “anything containing WOOLWORTHS → Groceries.” Rules always win, so your setup stays exactly how you want it.
3. 3Ask KalaWorth. Ask in plain English — “am I on track for rego?”, “where did my money go this month?” — and get an answer from your own numbers.