Finance
OterApp’s finance surface helps you track accounts, categorise spending, build budgets, manage debts, and project future balances.
Getting started: accounts
Start by creating accounts for each place you keep money:
- Checking — everyday spending
- Savings — money you’re not touching
- Credit card — tracked as a liability
- Cash — physical money
- Investment — stocks, funds, crypto
- Loan — what you owe
- Other — anything else
Each account has a name, type, and initial balance. You can archive accounts you no longer use — they stay in your history but are hidden from the main list.
Recording transactions
Add transactions to any account. Each transaction has an amount, date, description, and category. Transactions are one of three types:
- Income — money in
- Expense — money out
- Transfer — moving money between your accounts (this adjusts both accounts simultaneously)
Bulk import
Import transactions from a CSV or paste text from your bank statement. The app auto-categorises them based on keywords you’ve set up. Preview the import first to check everything looks right before confirming.
Categories and auto-classification
Categories organise your spending into buckets like Food, Housing, Transport, Entertainment, and 30+ more. Set up keyword rules to auto-classify transactions — for example, any transaction with “NETFLIX” in the description gets tagged as SUBSCRIPTION. The rule engine runs during import and whenever you add a new transaction manually.
Monthly budgets
Create budgets per category to keep spending on track. For each budget you set:
- Amount — how much you want to spend
- Category — what it applies to
- Date range — usually a month
- Rollover — unspent amount carries to the next period
The budget screen shows progress bars for each budget plus a running total of unbudgeted spending that hasn’t been assigned anywhere.
Auto-categorise transactions into budgets
Transactions that fall within a budget period and match its category are automatically counted against it. Use the auto-categorise feature to assign uncategorised or unbudgeted transactions in bulk.
Savings goals
Set a target amount and target date for a savings goal — a vacation fund, emergency fund, or new laptop. Link it to an account and track your progress. The app tells you how much you need to save per week or per month to hit your target on time.
Debt tracking
Track debts with a detailed amortisation schedule. Record payments and the app shows your remaining balance, interest, and projected payoff date. View the full amortisation table to see how each payment breaks down between principal and interest.
Balance prediction
The balance prediction engine looks at your accounts, scheduled transactions, past spending patterns, and recurring bills to project your future balance across three scenarios:
- Base — realistic, based on your actual data
- Optimistic — best case (lower spending, higher income)
- Pessimistic — worst case (unexpected expenses, lower income)
The prediction highlights danger events — dates where your balance might drop below a threshold or go negative — and tells you how much is safe to spend today without breaking your floor.
Scenario lab
Create “what-if” scenarios: add a hypothetical transaction, modify a category’s spending, or adjust a scheduled transaction to see how it changes your projected balance. Save scenarios to revisit later or compare multiple versions side by side.
Scheduled transactions
Set up recurring bills and income that repeat automatically — rent on the 1st, salary on the 15th, subscriptions monthly. Frequency options include daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and custom intervals. Scheduled transactions are included in balance predictions so you always see the full picture.
Reconciliation
Reconcile your accounts against bank statements. Mark transactions as cleared when they appear on your statement, and flag new transactions from the statement that aren’t yet in the app. The reconciliation view shows what’s matched, what’s missing, and any discrepancies.
Receipt scanning
Take a photo of a receipt and the app extracts the amount, date, and merchant. Review and correct the extracted fields before saving them as a transaction — accuracy depends on photo clarity, lighting, and how legible the receipt itself is, so the confirmation step is part of the flow, not an afterthought.
Transaction-book scan
If you have a page of multiple receipts or a bank statement screenshot, use the transaction-book scan. The app processes the whole image and returns a list of candidate transactions in one pass — you tick the ones to keep, edit any that need correcting, and confirm them as a batch.
Tips
- Keyword rules save time: Set up one rule per frequent merchant and your transactions categorise themselves.
- Prediction needs data: The more transactions and scheduled items you’ve entered, the more accurate the predictions become.
- Budgets roll over: Turn on rollover if you want unused budget from one month to carry into the next — useful for variable categories like groceries.
Our approach
Oter’s finance tools are built on research from behavioural economics — particularly prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), mental accounting (Thaler, 1985), and scarcity mindset (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). The prediction engine addresses financial anxiety by making uncertainty concrete and actionable, rather than abstract and frightening.