Glossary

Terms

Scope

Which money you are looking at: Personal, one of your businesses, or All. Chosen in the top bar; the page colour follows it (pink All, blue Personal, purple Business).

Personal / Business

The classification of an account or transaction. Any kind of account (checking, credit card, investment) can be either; you choose when you link it and can change it later.

Linked account

An account connected through your bank's own sign-in, which fills and updates itself. Also used for accounts you add by hand or that were created from a statement you uploaded.

Manual account

An account you added without a bank connection. Its balance and transactions come from statements you upload or entries you make.

Shoebox

The place for everything the bank feed cannot reach: statements, receipts, bills, licences. Files are read automatically and their contents filed.

Needs assignment

A Shoebox file that was read successfully but could not be matched to an account or business. It waits for one decision from you.

Catch-Up

The page that clears a backlog of uncategorised transactions, grouped by merchant so one decision applies to every row for that merchant.

Category

What a transaction was for. Each transaction carries a personal category you recognise and an IRS category used for tax.

Merchant rule

A remembered decision: once you categorise or classify a merchant, future transactions from it follow the same choice.

Transfer

Money moving between your own accounts, such as paying a credit card from checking. Never counted as income or spending.

Net worth

Everything you own minus everything you owe, across your linked accounts in the current scope.

Household

People who split money, married or not. Each keeps their own sign-in and accounts and chooses what the other can see. Net worth and taxes are never shared.

Filing entity

A business as the IRS sees it. A DBA that shares an EIN with its parent is rolled into the parent for tax.

Material participation

Being an owner or operator of a business rather than someone who merely has access to its books. Only material participation counts in your net worth, income and taxes.

Envelope budget

Zero-based budgeting: every dollar is assigned to an envelope before it is spent.

Early Bird

The launch offer every beta account receives: three months of the Pro tier free, no card required.

Plaid

The service that connects QLife Money to your bank, read-only, through the bank's own sign-in.

Pending transaction

A transaction the bank has authorised but not yet settled. Shown with a pending marker and counted once it clears.

Sync chip

The TXN, BAL and SYNC markers on an account row showing how many transactions are stored, when the balance was last read, and whether a sync is running.