QLife Money User Guide

QLife Money is in a closed beta. You were invited because you have a laptop or desktop, at least one checking account and one credit card at a major bank, and time to show us how the app fits your life. The product is real and we run our own personal and business money on it every day, but you will meet rough edges. That is the point. Tell us about them.

What you get. Every beta account is created on the Early Bird offer: three months of the Pro tier free, with no card required. The top bar of the dashboard shows how many days remain. Nothing in the app charges you during the beta, and there is no billing to set up.

What we ask. Use the app with your real accounts, join a short Zoom with us once or twice a month, and be honest about what is confusing or missing. On those calls you share your screen, so we see your real balances and transactions. The recordings stay on our own computer and are never uploaded or shared. You can stop sharing, or leave the program, at any time.

How this guide is written. It is a set of short, self-contained topics of three kinds. A concept explains how something works. A task walks you through doing it, one numbered step at a time. A reference lists the fields, statuses and terms you will meet on a page. Every dashboard page also has a ? button in the top bar that opens the same material for that page, so the app and the guide never disagree.

Where to start. Read Getting started, then How QLife Money thinks. After that, go wherever your questions are. Every topic stands on its own.

Fill it. Linking an account fills the app by itself. The bank feed brings about two years of history and keeps it current. Anything the feed cannot reach, such as a paper statement, a receipt or a business licence, goes into the Shoebox by upload or by forwarding an email. Only this first step is yours.

Sort it. We read every transaction and every document, name the merchant, pick the category, and tell personal from business. The handful we are unsure about wait for you in one place, and once you decide for a merchant we remember it. Nothing is counted twice. A transfer between your own accounts is a transfer, never income or spending.

Use it. Because it is sorted, everything else is arithmetic: what you are worth, what you spent, what you will owe. There is no second round of data entry for a budget, a report or a tax year.

Scope. Every account and transaction is either Personal or belongs to one of your businesses. The scope switcher in the top bar chooses what you are looking at, and the page's accent colour follows it: pink for All, blue for Personal, purple for Business. A business you merely have access to, for example one you keep the books for, never counts in your own net worth or taxes.

The shoebox. The name is deliberate. Most people hand an accountant a shoebox of receipts and statements once a year. QLife Money is the accountant that sorts the shoebox as it arrives, so that in April the work is already done.

Household. A household is for the people you actually split money with, married or not. Each person keeps their own sign-in and their own accounts, and chooses account by account what the other can see. Net worth and taxes are never shared.

The sidebar has five fixed entries: Home, Accounts, Shoebox, Taxes and More. Household appears once you have one, and Business once you have a business. Everything else lives on the More page, grouped by what you are trying to do, with a sentence under each entry saying what it is for.

Every page has its own web address. Bookmark anything, or send someone the link to the exact page instead of describing how to click to it.

The scope switcher at the top of every page chooses Personal, one of your businesses, or All. The page's colour follows it, so you can tell at a glance which money you are looking at.

The ? button in the top bar opens a help drawer for the page you are on: how it works, step-by-step tasks, and a reference list of its fields and statuses. The drawer and this guide are built from the same source.

The Early Bird counter in the top bar shows how many days of your free Pro trial remain.

It answers two questions: what are you worth right now, and is there anything that needs a decision from you. The top card shows your net worth (everything you own minus everything you owe across the accounts in the current scope) with a link to your linked accounts. Below it, a Needs you card lists only the things waiting on a decision: documents in the Shoebox that were read but could not be matched to an account, a backlog of uncategorised transactions, and an invitation to set up a household if you have not. When there is nothing to do the card does not appear at all.

The rest of the page is a read-only summary: the last 30 days (what you spent, what came in, how many transactions, and the share spent at LGBTQ+-owned and allied businesses), where you spend most, a net worth chart over the last 180 days, spending by week, where it goes, and a compact by-year strip that opens each tax year's detail. Balances load first and the activity figures and charts fill in a moment later, because live balances come from your bank while activity comes from transactions already stored.

Before any account is linked, Home shows a single card, 'Your shoebox is empty. Let's fill it', with buttons to connect a bank or upload a statement.

It supports accounts linked through Plaid, accounts you enter by hand, and accounts created from a statement you uploaded, and it lets you group accounts as Personal or assigned to a specific Business. Accounts linked through Stripe Financial Connections before the Early Bird launch still appear and sync, but every new link goes through Plaid. Each account row shows the institution logo, display name, account type, and a live chip cluster (TXN, BAL, SYNC) that updates asynchronously after the page loads. You can rename accounts with nicknames, assign them to a business, sync them on demand, upload documents directly onto a row, and delete or merge accounts from this single page.

It shows every inflow and outflow across your linked accounts in one place, letting you assign scope (Personal or a specific business), apply expense categories, attach IRS lines, split a charge across categories, and add a note about what it was for.

The page is designed for both day-to-day review and periodic categorization work. You can browse by list or calendar, zoom by day, week, month, or year, filter down to one or more accounts, search across all dates at once, or select multiple rows and edit them in one action. The page follows the scope switcher (Personal, a business, or All). The header shows the count of transactions in view with the total out and total in. An embedded Claude chat drawer lets you describe what you want, such as "tag all Amazon charges as office expense for VGM LLC", and Claude proposes the changes before you confirm them.

Instead of categorizing one transaction at a time, it groups everything uncategorized by merchant, so a single decision tags every transaction from that merchant at once (this year and automatically going forward, via a merchant rule). Pick an entity (Personal or a business) and a year; the merchants with the most uncategorized transactions rise to the top, so you knock out the biggest chunks first.

It is designed for people who want a fast financial pulse without building their own spreadsheets: month-to-date spend, savings rate, net worth trend, recurring subscription detection, a year-long spending heatmap, top merchants, top categories, and a 12-month cashflow chart, all in one scrollable view.

Insights respect the active scope set in the scope switcher. Personal filters out business-classified rows; a specific business shows only that business's transactions. The Net worth card is the exception: it shows assets minus liabilities across all your linked accounts regardless of scope. If no matching transactions exist, a prompt to link an account is shown instead.

It is designed for people who want to track what they owe on credit cards, know when payments are due, and monitor how much of their credit limit is being used. Data is stored in QLife Money's database and refreshed automatically when you link or sync an account; you can also force a live pull at any time with the Refresh from bank button. The page follows the scope switcher: Personal shows personal cards, a business shows only that business's cards, and All shows everything. Cards that can't provide liability data show an informational note with a link to Accounts so you can re-link them through Plaid.

If no credit cards are linked, the page says 'No credit cards linked yet' and points you to Accounts.

Rather than typing in balances, you record the underlying activity (buys, sells, dividends, fees, and interest) and QLife Money rolls it up into holdings with a cost basis, average price, market value, and unrealized gain per position. Stat tiles at the top summarize total portfolio value, total cost basis, total unrealized gain (green when up, red when down), and realized gain locked in from sales. Because live market prices aren't always available, you can set a manual latest price per symbol to re-value a holding. The page follows the account switcher's scope (All, Personal, or a specific Business) exactly like Transactions.

The Holdings table columns are Symbol, Class, Qty, Avg cost, Price, Market value, and Unrealized. Before any activity exists the page shows 'No holdings yet' and 'No activity recorded yet'.

Unlike the Transactions page — which shows bank-feed data — Expenses focuses on document-based records: a PDF invoice from a vendor, an email receipt from an online purchase, or a photo you take of a paper receipt. Each item shows its source, amount, due date when present, and whether it has been matched to a bank transaction.

The page is intended for anyone who needs a paper trail alongside their bank data — freelancers tracking vendor invoices, small-business owners reconciling bills, or individuals who want receipts attached to their records. Uploaded files are processed automatically: the amount, merchant, and date are extracted and stored as an expense entry.

If there are no expenses yet, the list says 'No expenses yet. Drop a receipt above or link an email account to auto-detect bills.'

Files you upload are automatically processed by Claude: statements have their transactions extracted and imported; receipts are parsed for merchant, amount, date, and card details and matched to the charge on your accounts when one exists; tax returns and business compliance documents (licenses, permits, registrations, annual reports, and the like) are recognized and filed; other documents are stored. The page sorts your files into up to four groups, in this order: NEEDS YOU, COULDN'T READ, READING NOW, and FILED, so you always know what still requires action.

The Shoebox complements the Transactions, Expenses, and Compliance pages by handling the offline or paper side of your financial life. It is especially useful for uploading historical bank statements to backfill transaction history, or attaching scanned receipts to the charge they belong to when your bank feed does not capture the detail.

Each row shows a plain-English line saying what happened to the document, for example how many transactions were added and to which account, or that a receipt was attached to a specific charge. While a file is being read, the row shows a progress bar and the current stage.

You can also get documents in without visiting the page at all: forward them by email. The Forward it in panel at the bottom of the Shoebox shows the address to send to (shoebox@qlife.money) and the list of email addresses allowed to send. Because an email From: header can be forged, only addresses you have registered and confirmed are accepted, and every message must also pass spam, virus and sender-authentication checks. Your sign-in address is trusted automatically. Attachments become Shoebox files exactly as if you had uploaded them; an email with no attachment but a receipt in the body — an order confirmation, for example — has its line items read straight out of the message text.

QLife Money scans linked inboxes in the background to detect receipts, bills, and invoices, which then appear on the Expenses page. This page is a plain mail viewer: it lets you browse the underlying messages and open one to read it. It does not show what was extracted from a message.

The page needs to know which inbox to open. If you reach it without choosing an account, you are sent to My Account instead.

The page lists every budget across Personal and all your businesses together, regardless of the scope switcher. Each budget has a name, a type (Monthly, Quarterly, Annual, or Custom), a date range, and planned income and planned expense targets. Click a budget to see its detail view with actual versus planned amounts, and, when the budget has them, a line-item breakdown by category and any notes.

Instead of comparing actuals to a fixed plan, you give every dollar of your income a job by assigning it to spending categories ("envelopes") one month at a time, until the To Be Budgeted figure at the top reaches $0. Each month has its own set of budgeted amounts; you can move between months with the arrow controls. The page is personal-scope only. It reads a month's rollup from the envelope-budget endpoint and saves each category's budgeted amount and carryover setting as you edit them.

It combines two server-computed feeds: upcoming bills (recurring outflows like subscriptions and loan payments, plus recurring inflows like paychecks, detected from your transaction history, looking 60 days ahead) and a day-by-day cash-flow forecast of your projected account balance (looking 30 days ahead). Three stat tiles sit at the top: Upcoming outflow, Projected balance, and Projected low point, which turns red and warns of overdraft risk when it dips below zero. Below them are the Cash-flow forecast chart and the Upcoming bills list. The page follows the account switcher's scope (All, Personal, or a specific Business) exactly like Transactions.

Every active goal is shown as a card with a labeled progress bar, a remaining-amount indicator, and quick access to edit or delete the goal. The page is personal-scope only and reads from and writes to your account's goals collection.

Define your household inclusively: spouses, partners, throuples, and chosen family. Create a household, invite members by email as a Partner or a Viewer, choose exactly which of your personal accounts to share, and see a per-member breakdown of money in, money out, and net across the shared accounts. If someone invites you, opening their invite link brings you here and joins you to their household automatically.

It opens on a grid: your filing entities — Personal, plus each of your businesses — run down the side, and tax years run across the top. Each cell shows a status dot (filed, in progress, has activity but not started, or nothing yet) and, when the year has activity, a computed net figure. If you have no tax years yet, the page says so and asks you to categorize some transactions or upload a prior-year return to the Shoebox. Each cell is a link: clicking it opens that entity-year workspace as its own page (with its own address you can bookmark or share), where QLife Money automatically computes income and deductions from the transactions you've already categorized — Schedule C lines for a business, Schedule A lines plus income for personal — rather than making you type figures in by hand. Prior-year tax returns you upload to the Shoebox are recognized automatically and appear in the grid under the correct entity and year.

Each report covers a specific period and shows total income, total expenses, transaction count, and the top merchants and categories by spending for that period. Reports are produced automatically by a task that runs nightly at 02:00 UTC, so the page is read-only — there are no controls to create or delete reports manually.

Entries are generated automatically when you use Tax, Compliance, and Budget features — you cannot add, edit, or delete them. The log displays up to 200 of the most recent entries, grouped by date, and combines your personal activity with per-business activity in a single unified view.

Each row is a link to that business's own page. From here you can open a full QLife Money Business Account backed by Stripe Treasury, add a tracking-only business for expense and compliance monitoring without a bank account, or drill into an individual business to view its Stripe Connect accounts, financial account balances, and linked external bank accounts. With no businesses yet, the page prompts you to use either button.

Pick your jurisdiction (Clark County, Nevada is built in, plus a general U.S. checklist) and it walks you through everything: confirming zoning, registering the entity and business name, getting your state and local licenses, registering for taxes, and opening separate business bank accounts. Each step shows who to contact and the relevant link or phone number. Steps that renew every year (like the Nevada State Business License and the county license) are marked 'Annual' so you know they recur. Check off steps as you complete them; your progress is saved. The goal is to help you set things up correctly the first time instead of fixing problems in reverse years later.

During the current beta new business account applications are paused, so for most members the page shows 'Business accounts are paused' instead of the application form. It explains that nothing changes for businesses already open (existing accounts, transactions, and bookkeeping keep working), offers 'Back to My Businesses' and 'Email us' (hello@qlife.money) buttons so you can ask to be put at the front of the line, and points out that you can still add a tracking-only business from My Businesses, which gives you categorization, Schedule C reporting, and the balance sheet without a Stripe account. When applications reopen, the page is a two-step process: read and accept seven required legal agreements, then be redirected to Stripe's hosted verification flow to complete KYC and Customer Identification Program (CIP) requirements, with required disclosures about QLife Money's banking partner (Fifth Third Bank, N.A., Member FDIC) and FDIC pass-through insurance shown first. It can be launched for a brand-new business or to add another Stripe Connect account to an existing business. Platform admins additionally see a 'Bypass the pause' card with a 'Bypass business account pause' button that opens a guided, audited walkthrough for a Connect account with a Treasury financial account and card issuing.

Because invoices always belong to a business, the page works within the business currently selected in the account switcher — if you're in All or Personal scope, it asks you to pick a business first. Three tabs organize the work: Invoices (the list of everything billed, with its status and balance), Clients (the people and companies you bill), and AR Aging (a breakdown of outstanding balances by how far past due they are). Amounts are entered in dollars and stored as cents; tax is entered as a percent. The server recomputes every subtotal, tax, and total, so the figures you see always reflect the authoritative record.

Pick the Stripe account if the business has more than one, filter by status, and open any invoice's Stripe page or PDF. This page only lists invoices; it doesn't change them.

There are two places it can come from, and they are not interchangeable. **Payments** is what customers have paid you — settled, but not yet deposited. It is called Payments rather than card sales because ACH, Link and Cash App payments land there too. **Business Checking** is a real bank account with its own routing and account number, FDIC-insured through Fifth Third; a business can hold more than one, so a tax escrow and a payroll account can each be their own. The rails differ per source: Payments sends standard (free, 1-2 days) or instant (minutes, free to you - Stripe bills the 1% to QLife Money as the platform). Business Checking sends by ACH (free, 1-2 days), wire (same day, your bank charges a fee), or instantly and free to another of your own accounts. Only the rails that this source and this destination can both do are offered, and the cheapest fast one is pre-selected - never a rail that charges you, so a wire is always a deliberate choice. Nothing sends without a review step whose figures the server computed. If moving money isn't switched on for your business, the page shows 'Not switched on yet' with a support@qlife.money link instead of the form; if the business has neither a Payments balance nor a Business Checking account it shows 'Nothing to move money from'. When you have both Payments and Business Checking, tabs at the top let you pick the source, each showing its available amount.

Everything is read live from Stripe. Owners and admins of the business can freeze, unfreeze or cancel a card, lower its limit, and add merchant blocks at any time. Issuing new cards, adding cardholders, raising limits and lifting merchant blocks are held back during the current beta: the '+ Cardholder' and '+ New card' buttons only appear when card issuing is switched on for you, and platform admins see a notice that new cards are off for members but can still issue them. A business with no Stripe account shows 'This business has no Stripe account yet, so it has no cards' with a link to open one, and an account without card issuing shows 'Card issuing isn't enabled on this Stripe account.'

You can see each card's number, check its recent purchases, freeze it if it's lost, and accept the card terms Stripe needs before a new card works. Turning a frozen card back on, limits and cancelling are handled by the business's owners and admins.

It keeps a chart of accounts, records journal entries as balanced debits and credits, and produces the three statements those entries roll up into: a trial balance, a balance sheet, and an income statement. It is business-scoped — the page opens on the business active in the account switcher (or your first business), and the selector at the top changes it. With no business yet, the page asks you to add one first. It has three tabs: Chart of Accounts, Journal Entries, and Statements. The first time you open it for a business, a standard chart of accounts is seeded automatically. Every amount is stored and computed in integer cents and displayed as formatted dollars.

Where the Tax Center tells you income minus expenses, the Balance Sheet tells you what an entity owns and owes at a point in time: Assets (cash in your linked accounts plus fixed assets like vehicles and equipment, shown net of depreciation), Liabilities (what you owe on credit cards and loans), and Equity. Equity is calculated as assets minus liabilities, so the statement always balances; it also shows the year's net income from your categorized activity. Pick an entity (Personal or one of your businesses — there is no All option, since a balance sheet is per entity) and a year at the top; the page opens on whichever business is active in the switcher, or Personal. A multi-member LLC or partnership filing a Form 1065 is required to include this as its Schedule L, so keeping it current matters at tax time.

The IRS requires you to issue a Form 1099-NEC to anyone you pay $600 or more in a year for services — and to do that you first need their W-9 (legal name, tax classification, taxpayer ID, and address). QLife Money lets you send each contractor a secure self-service link where they fill in and sign their own W-9 (no account needed on their end); the completed W-9 lands back here as 'W-9 on file.' A contractor whose link has been sent but not yet filled in shows 'W-9 requested'. Contractors belong to a business, so you need at least one business first. Pick a business and a year at the top; each contractor shows how much you've paid them that year and whether they've crossed the $600 threshold.

It is organized into three sections: an Upcoming Deadlines card that surfaces the most time-sensitive items first (it appears only once you have something with a date), a Registrations and Licenses tracker for permits and state filings, and a Tax Obligations tracker for recurring business tax payments. The page requires at least one business (otherwise it says 'Compliance tracking requires a business account') and focuses on whichever business is currently active; if you have multiple businesses you can switch between them using the business picker. Items are added from this page; there is no edit or delete control here.

The heading shows how many are listed, for example 'Marketplace (12 businesses)', and the list is limited to the first 20 active businesses. Each row shows the business name, its category, and its city and state. If there are none, the page says 'No businesses listed yet.' It is read-only: there is nothing to click or edit here.

It is read-only: there are no controls to create, edit, or sign up for events from this page. It shows up to 20 published events, newest first, under the heading Upcoming Events. If there are none, the page says No upcoming events.

It is divided into three areas: a read-only Sign-In Identity section showing your login email, authentication method, and membership information; an editable Account Details form for your name, nickname, and contact email; and a Linked Email Accounts section for connecting Gmail or iCloud inboxes so the platform can automatically find receipts, bills, and due dates. A Sign out button is also available under Account Actions.

You can set a display name, pronouns, and bio, upload and crop a profile photo, and choose which of those details other members can see using per-field visibility toggles. The display name saves on its own, about a second after you stop typing or when you leave the field; pronouns, bio, and the visibility toggles are saved together by clicking Save changes. A separate card below the form, Names we should never show you, lets you list names to hide from your own view of statements and receipts.

The page header displays the current unread count. Individual notifications can be marked as read from this page; there is no bulk mark-all-read control.

Bank connections are read-only. When you link an account you sign in on your bank's own screen through Plaid. QLife Money never sees your bank password and cannot move money out of a linked account.

We do not sell your data and we do not run ads. The business is the subscription. No third party pays for your transactions, and nothing is sent to advertising platforms.

The name you see is the name you chose. Display name and pronouns are first-class fields on My Profile. Your legal name is stored separately and used only where a bank or the IRS requires it. If a bank record carries a name you no longer use, it is scrubbed from what you see on screen.

What a household member sees is your choice, account by account. Net worth and taxes are never shared. Someone with access to a business you own sees that business's data only, never your personal accounts.

Everything you upload is kept in the original. A receipt image is the proof behind a deduction, so we never downsize or discard it.

You are in control. Disconnect any account from the Accounts page, export your transactions as CSV, or ask us to delete your account at any time. Privacy requests go to privacy@qlife.money. The full Privacy Policy has the detail.

Everything else lives on the More page, grouped by what you are trying to do, with a sentence under each entry saying what it is for. Nothing was removed when the sidebar was shortened: every page still has its own address, still works, and can still be bookmarked or sent to someone.

Some sections on More appear only when they apply. The business tools show once you have a business (before that you see Start a Business instead), and Household and Business also promote themselves into the sidebar once you have one, so the things you actually use rise to the top over time.