How Plenty's cashflow product works

tldr; Plenty’s cashflow product makes it easy for you and your partner to know what’s happening with your money.

In today’s blog post, we’ll help you understand:

• How does Plenty’s cashflow product work

• How does Plenty’s cashflow product work for partners

• How to track your income

• How to track your spending

• How to tracking your saving / investing

• What’s coming next

  
  

What is cashflow?

The term cashflow comes from the business world: all businesses track the flow of cash in (ie. what you earn) and the flow of cash out (ie. what you spend).

Knowing what’s happening with all your money across earning, saving / investing, and spending, is important to have a picture of how healthy your finances are. Many budgeting apps are exclusively focused on spending, but wealth is only truly built when there is active saving / investing …. not just budgeting. At Plenty, we brought this all into one elegant interface to make it as easy as possible to move forward faster.

How does Plenty’s cashflow product work

Plenty supports connections to over 12,000 institutions to bring in your checking, savings, credit card, loans, or investment account data. We real-time stream transactions from all of your connected accounts, and bring you insights on Plenty.

There are three key areas for the cashflow dashboard:

• Spending

• Saving & Investing

• Income

Spending: includes all transactions (incl. refunds) for your checking accounts and credit cards.

Saving & Investing: includes all money deposited / withdrawn in your Plenty investment accounts and your non-Plenty savings accounts or investment accounts.

Income: includes all paychecks deposited into checking accounts, as well as income into saving or investment accounts.

How does Plenty’s cashflow product work for couples

Plenty provides two views on your cashflow: a “what’s ours” vs. “what’s mine” view.

For couples who share everything: you’ll only need to use the “What’s ours” view to see a complete picture of money moving across all the accounts you share. It doesn’t matter if an account or credit card only has 1 primary holder, you’ll both be able to share equal visibility of everything that’s happening in the account.

For couples in between: you’ll spend time between the “what’s ours” and “what’s mine” view. “What’s mine” includes everything under your name, or that are marked private. “What ours” is anything that’s actually a joint account, or an account you’ve marked as shared

For couples who don’t share anything: If you each own accounts or credit cards with shared expenses, you can easily share visibility with your partner to track where your money is going. If you’re not ready to share visibility over any accounts and prefer to use venmo / splitwise to split each expense, Plenty may not be the best product for you. Plenty primarily works best for couples who would like easier sharing or more transparency with their partner on at least 1 account or credit card.

How to track your spending

• Plenty automatically pulls in all your transactions across your checking accounts (ie. if you pay your utility bill or rent here), and your credit cards (for as many as you connect)

• We auto-categorize the transaction and give you the ability to see your spending by merchant or category

• Easily see how this month is going, by comparing your spending to your 3-month average

• Dive into month-to-month trends per category or merchant to understand increases or or decreases

  
  

How to tracking your saving / investing

• We want to make it easy for you to see opportunities to save / invest more. It starts with a single place to understand: how much are we saving / investing today?

• Your $ total should capture all money you’re actively moving into (or out of) saving and investing accounts at Plenty and beyond.

• We pull in all saving / investing contributions into your Plenty goals, and add in all deposits (or withdrawals) into non-Plenty saving / investing accounts to we can help you answer: how much are we putting to work each month?

What about deposits in a checking account? If it’s in a checking account, chances are… it’s not growing much. Don’t miss out on money you deserve. Plenty’s cash+ investing goals, you can earn 5.08% APY.

How to track your income

• We’ll easily help you and your partner understand how much you’re earning across your paychecks, or the interest or dividend income you’re earning in your saving and investing acconts.

What about transfers in / transfers out?

We know money moving between accounts can make tracking confusing. We’ve made some clean up decisions that hopefully make your experience better. Some of the key ones include:

• If you pay your credit card bill, we don’t count that as ‘spending’

• If you move money between two checking accounts, we don’t include that in spending

• If you use venmo, we do include that as spending (more to come on pulling in venmo data)

  
  

What’s coming summer 2024

• Budgeting: we’ll give you the ability to set budget goals per category and track how each month goes

• Custom categories: you will be able to add additional custom categories

• Manual transactions: have a cash transaction you want logged? We’ll give you the ability to record transactions however you’d like

• Upgraded connections and categorization: we’re continually improving data quality and connections to additional accounts. We have some big upgrades planned here that will increase the number of institutions we can connect to (incl. Apple card, Capital One, and Fidelity), and improve transaction categorization even further.

Start your free trial with Plenty today.

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Plenty’s cash management product invests 99.5%+ of the portfolio in US-government backed securities. Although the strategy seeks to preserve the value of your investment at $1.00 per share, it cannot guarantee it will do so. You could lose money by investing in the strategy. Plenty’s cash management product is SIPC insured. An investment in the strategy is not a bank account and is not insured or guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other government agency. The rate quoted is subject to change and will decrease or increase based on changes in market conditions, interest rates, among other factors. The rate quoted is net of transaction and advisory fees.