Welcome to Monarch! We’re so glad you’re here.

The goal of setup is simple: connect your accounts so you get one complete picture of your finances. From there, you can build a budget, set goals, track your net worth, and share it all with your household.

Remember: You don’t have to do everything at once. Follow the steps below in order, or skip ahead to whatever matters most to you right now.

If you ever feel stuck, Monarch offers an optional AI Assistant you can use to ask questions about what you’re seeing, how features work, or what to do next.

How Monarch is organized

Before jumping in, it helps to understand how Monarch thinks about your finances. Monarch is organized into a few core sections, each with a different focus.

• The Dashboard uses widgets to surface the most important information, and you can customize it to focus on what matters most to you.
• Accounts show where your money lives.
• Transactions show what’s happening day to day, and categories and tags help organize your activity.
• Reports and Cashflow help you understand trends over time.
• Budgets and Recurring help you plan monthly spending.
• Goals help you plan for the future.
• Investments help you track portfolio balances and performance over time.
• Settings is where you manage your account, household, preferences, institutions, categories, rules, tags, and other customization options.

Everything builds on linking your accounts, so that’s where it’s easiest for most people to start.

Monarch subscription options: Monarch offers two subscription tiers: Core and Plus. All of the setup steps in this guide apply to all Monarch users regardless of your subscription. Core is our basic subscription and suitable for most users, while Monarch Plus includes additional tools for deeper planning and guidance, like business tracking, forecasting, advanced investments, and more. You can start with the basics, then explore Plus features at any time.

The Basics

1. Connect your accounts
2. Review your categories
3. Create a budget
4. Set a goal
5. Make it yours

Step 1: Connect your accounts

This is the most important step. Monarch works best when it can see everything, so connect as many accounts as you can before doing anything else. If you have a lot, start with your main checking, savings, and credit card accounts.

Monarch uses data providers (Plaid, Mastercard (Finicity), and MX) to securely connect your financial institutions with read-only access.

We believe in data transparency, so we offer a public Connection Status Dashboard so you can see which banks and institutions are well supported. Check your bank here.

What to connect first

To get started, focus on your most popular accounts:

• The bank holding your primary checking account
• Your savings account
• Your most-used credit card(s)

Later, you can add additional accounts such as loans, investments, retirement accounts, and more. You don’t need to connect everything on day one, but the more complete your accounts are, the more accurate your budget, net worth, and reports will be.

Add and manage accounts

Go to Settings > Institutions to add institutions and see all of your connected institutions in one list. Here, you can edit, rename, hide, and manage your accounts at a glance.

Once connected, you can use the Accounts tab to view your balances, recent activity, and other account-level details as you look at your finances day to day.

💡 Tip: You can also add accounts directly from the Accounts tab.

If an account won’t connect

It can be normal for some banks to take a few tries or require additional security steps to connect. Some banks don’t work well with third parties at all. If you run into issues, you can:

• Check our Connection Status Dashboard to see if the institution is supported
• Try connecting through a different data provider (Plaid, MX, or Finicity) if multiple options are available
• Add the account manually
• Open a support ticket (hint: this works best for well-supported institutions)
• Read more about connection troubleshooting

💡 Tip: If one account won’t connect, move on and connect what you can. Monarch still works with partial data, and you can come back later.

Account history

Every account pulls in a different amount of historical data. Some may include years, while others include just a few months—it depends on what the bank provides. For now, we recommend moving forward with the history that’s automatically added. If you’d like, you can manually import additional balance or transaction history later.

Manual accounts

You can also add manual accounts and upload past balance history and transactions to fill in the gaps. Manual accounts are ideal when balances rarely change (such as a mortgage or auto loan), or for other assets you want to track that aren’t linked to a bank account.

💡 Tip: Want a clean starting point? Under Settings > Data, you can delete history before a chosen date so all your accounts line up going forward. This permanently deletes that history, so use it carefully.

Step 2: Review your categories

Once accounts are connected and transactions start syncing, take a few minutes to make your categories match your real life. For example, if you rent, you can turn off the mortgage category, and if you don’t have children, you’ll want to disable the kid-related categories.

From Settings > Categories, you can:

• Rename categories and groups (pro tip: personalize the emoji icon, too!)
• Disable categories you don’t use
  • Note: If any transactions were already assigned to a category you want to disable, you’ll be prompted to move them to a new or different category.
• Create new custom categories or groups
• Reorder categories and groups, or move categories into new groups

This step doesn’t need to be perfect—for now, aim for categories that generally match how you think about your spending, and refine them over time.

Once you have your categories roughly worked out, visit your Transactions page and spend some time reviewing the categories assigned to your transactions and updating them as needed. We recommend looking back at about three months’ worth of transactions, but feel free to do more or less. You can always come back later.

💡 Tip: Use rules to save time
As you categorize transactions, you can create rules to automatically assign categories to future similar transactions. Look for the “Create rule” dialog box to pop up in the lower right corner on web when updating transactions. This helps keep your data organized with less manual work over time.

Tags

Tags add an extra layer of organization. A transaction will always have just one category, but can have many tags. Tags are a flexible way to group transactions across categories, like “Vacation 2026” or “Tax deductible.” You can manage your tags in Settings > Tags.

Step 3: Create your budget

Before budgeting, make sure your income transactions are categorized correctly (paychecks, interest, bonuses, business income, etc.), since your budget is based on your expected monthly income.

Monarch offers two styles:

• Flex budgeting (default) – focuses on one flexible spending number instead of many categories
• Category budgeting – the traditional, line-by-line approach

Not sure which will meet your needs best? Read Flex vs. Category Budgeting to decide. You can switch between them anytime from the budget page settings (Budget > Settings).

How budgeting works

• Your expected monthly income sets the budget total
• Expenses and savings are subtracted to balance the month
• Budgets reset monthly unless you enable rollovers

💡 Tip: By default, budgets reset each month. If you’d rather carry a surplus or shortfall into the next month, turn on rollovers using the gear icon next to a category.

Once you’re ready to start setting up your budget, you can read more here.

Step 4: Create a goal

Goals help you plan ahead, like building an emergency fund, saving for a big purchase, or paying off debt.

Monarch supports two types of goals:

• Save up goals help you set money aside for future priorities, like an emergency fund, vacation, down payment, or other big purchase. Learn more about using Save Up Goals.
• Pay down goals help you track and plan progress toward paying off debt, like credit cards, student loans, auto loans, or a mortgage. Learn more about using Pay Down Goals.

Set up your first goal to create a prioritized list of what you’re working toward, and link accounts to automatically track your progress.

Step 5: Make it yours

Once the basics are done, these extras help tailor Monarch to you:

• Add household members (like a spouse, partner, or parent) for free. Everyone gets their own login and shares the same accounts, transactions, and budget.
  • Note: All household members can see all connected accounts. Accounts cannot be hidden from specific members.
  • Use shared views to assign account or transaction ownership and see spending by person.
• Customize your dashboard by rearranging or hiding tiles so what matters most is front and center.
  • Tip: Dashboard layouts are separate on web and mobile, so you can customize each experience.
• Explore reports to see spending, income, cash flow, and net worth trends over time.
• Update your profile and household info in Settings > Profile and Settings > Household for even more personalized insights and data.
• Add balance and transaction history if you want to fill in historical gaps.
• Update merchant names and icons to make your transaction list easier to scan in Settings > Merchants.

That’s it for the basics! Connect, categorize, budget, and set a goal, and you’ll have a full view of your finances. When you’re ready, there’s even more to explore with reports, investments, Monarch Plus, and more.

Welcome aboard!

A note on mobile versus web 

Some features are only available on web or mobile, so you’ll get the most out of Monarch when you use both. Many people like to use the mobile app for daily check-ins, and then visit the website weekly or monthly for reports and more detailed customization.

Web only

Transfer Tool

Command K Search & Shortcuts

Add PDF files as an attachment (web and mobile both support images)

Manually edit an account balance

Import balance and transaction history

Mobile only

Swipe to review transactions

Monthly progress reports

Receipt scanning

Connect Apple Card