Quickstart

Learn the basics of Latwy and get started in just a few minutes

Welcome to Latwy! If you just started your 30-day free trial and aren't sure how to start, you're in the right place. If you're still on the fence, read on to see how simple it is to automatically track your spending.

How does Latwy work?

Latwy doesn't work like other personal finance apps. Instead of connecting your bank accounts using dubious third-party aggregators, Latwy extracts transaction data from the email alerts your bank sends when you make a purchase or a withdrawal. You can learn how to set up email purchase alerts here.

When you signed up for Latwy, you were assigned a unique Latwy email address that you can view at any time by going to the Settings page after logging in. To automatically track purchases and withdrawals for one of you bank accounts or credit cards, you need to get your bank's alert emails to your Latwy email address. You can do this a couple different ways.

• If your bank allows you to add a secondary email address, set it to your Latwy email address and configure purchase or withdrawal alerts to be sent directly.
• If your bank does not allow you to add a secondary email address, you can forward purchase and withdrawal alerts to your Latwy email address. If you use Gmail, here are the instructions to automatically forward emails using filters. Do not set your primary bank email to your Latwy email address.

What happens when a transaction is created?

When Latwy receives a purchase or withdrawal alert email, the following steps occur in order:

1. Latwy parses the email and extracts the transaction data using AI. The email must include the purchase or withdrawal amount and the last four digits of the account number (or something similar). If these are not included, the parsing will fail.
2. A category and subcategory are chosen for the transaction in one of two ways:
   • If there are previous transactions with the exact same merchant name, the category and subcategory of the most recent transaction is used.
   • If the merchant name is new, AI is used to categorize the subcategorize the transaction.
3. If the account for this transaction does not yet exist, it is created automatically using the last four digits of the account number extracted from the email. If possible, the account type and institution are extracted as well. You can set a name for the account by going to the Accounts page and clicking on the account. For future transactions, this account information will override information pulled from alert emails.
4. Rules are executed. A rule allows you to add tags or set the category and subcategory of a transaction based on simple or complex conditions. This will override the category and subcategory set in the previous step. You can create and edit rules on the Rules page. Rules are always executed in the order they appear on the Rules page. They can be reordered at any time.
   • Example rule: If a transaction occurred on an account ending in 5555 or 6666 AND the merchant name contains Amazon, tag with household.
5. The transaction is created. It will now show up on the Transactions page.
6. Any webhooks you've set up for the transaction.created event will be sent. Webhooks require a subscription to the Premium plan.
7. Any actions you've set up with a transactions.created trigger and with conditions that match the created transaction will be executed. A single transaction can trigger multiple actions.
   • Example action: When a transaction is created with the household tag, send a custom alert via Discord with the information about the transaction. Also include an image of a Dashboard Item that shows monthly household spending over time.
8. Information about the transaction, rules, and actions can be found on the Logs page. If a rule or action did something unexpected or failed to execute, the log of the transaction creation will tell you what happened.

Make Latwy your own

Latwy is designed to be tailored to how you think about money. Once you're getting purchases and withdrawals into Latwy automatically, you can:

• Set up dashboard items, with charts and visuals, with information you care about.
• Create rules to tag and categorize transactions in a way that makes sense to you.
• Set up alerts triggered by new transactions or on a schedule. A daily or weekly spending update sent to Telegram (or email, Slack, etc...) can help you keep tabs on your spending without needing to remember to open an app.

If any questions or issues come up during your free trial or after you've decided to subscribe, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. You should get a response within a day or two.