Money Management Online Banking Feature

Once your primary accounts have been loaded, we recommend the following next steps:

1. Link your external accounts.

Add accounts from other institutions so you can view your whole financial picture in one place. Nearly any financial account can be linked! Checking and savings accounts, investments, credit cards, loans, mortgages and other lines of credit can all be added. You can also easily track Cash or Property values by adding manual accounts.

After identifying the external account that you wish to add, you’ll be asked to provide your authentication credentials for that institution, this will verify your identity and should allow your financial data to be brought into your Digital Banking account for viewing purposes. Go to the “Manage Money” tab and select “Accounts” to get started. Add accounts and get your complete financial picture.

Tip: Property accounts are important in Net Worth for tracking your high-value assets, such as your house or vehicles.

2. Review your transaction history.

Transactions will be automatically cleansed for readability, and categorized to make it easy to see where your money is going. However, not all transactions can be automatically categorized, so it’s important to review your transactions regularly. For example, checks and ATM withdrawals will be left “Uncategorized,” and you will be prompted to assign a category for such transactions. Make any changes necessary to ensure your spending data is complete and accurate.

It can be helpful to review your Spending chart after reviewing your Transactions. You will better understand how your transaction categories influence your financial reports, and it can often reveal spending details that need to be recategorized.

3. Set up a budget.

A budget makes it easy to visualize how much you’ve spent and how much money you have left for the month. Select “Auto Generate Budget” to let Money Management calculate your average monthly spending in each category for the last two months with complete data. This gives you a realistic starting point for your budget.

Tip: An auto-generated budget will be more accurate and helpful if you first add any outside accounts and review your transactions so that your budget calculations are based on a full and complete spending history.

4. Stay in the loop.

Alerts can keep you notified of important things happening with your accounts, like a low balance or upcoming debt payment.

The transactions tab provides a consolidated list of your recent transactions from all accounts. Money Management automatically cleanses and categorizes your transactions to make them easier for you to review and work with. If you don’t have any accounts that were automatically linked, you may be prompted to add an account. When you begin using Money Management, it will immediately start downloading your transactions.

When your transactions are pulled into Money Management, they will be automatically categorized. We encourage you to go through your transactions history and check that each transaction is categorized correctly. If you re-categorize a transaction, Money Management will attempt to remember your preference the next time you post a similar transaction. Customizing your transactions will make Money Management more accurate in the future. To change a category, click on the category you wish to edit and select the correct transaction category from the list.

The spending tab shows you where your money is going, by category, so you can better understand your spending habits and stay on track. Click on a section of the wheel to see how much you spent in each category. If your spending in a category is below 3% of your overall spending, it will be grouped in “Other” with other low-spending categories. Click on any category to see a breakdown of spending by subcategory, such as how much of your spending in Food & Dining is on groceries versus eating out. Click on any subcategory, or on the center of the spending wheel, to see the transactions associated with the selected subcategory. From this view, you can also edit the transaction details just like in the main transactions widget.

Budgets can help you set realistic monthly spending limits and monitor your progress toward hitting those limits. The Budgets tab draws your eye to the categories that need your attention the most — big bubbles represent a larger portion of your monthly budget, and red bubbles have exceeded their monthly allowance.

Auto-Generate Budgets

When you first use Budgets, you have the option to “Auto-Generate Budgets” or to start from scratch. We encourage you to use the auto-generate budgets feature, which will create a starting budget for you based on your average spending in each category over the previous 90 days. This budget calculation will be more helpful if you have added all your accounts first and have reviewed your transaction history for accuracy. Still, you should review your generated budget and adjust them if necessary. The variable nature of initial aggregation can impact the accuracy of your historical spending averages. The size of your bubble represents the budget amount, relative to your overall budget. The larger the bubble, the more of your overall budget that category consumes. The bubble will grow to reflect the percentage the category represents.

Alerts can help you stay on track by keeping you notified of important events in your finances. You must verify your email address and/or your mobile phone number before alerts can be sent to you.

Click the notifications icon (the bell in the upper right corner), then click the setting (sprocket) icon.

By default, “simple alerts” are enabled. That means you’ll receive the following alerts on the Notifications tab, via email and mobile:

• A large deposit over $500 occurs
• A large expense over $100 occurs
• An account balance falls below $100
• You get charged a fee
• You have a debt payment coming up
• You exceed a budget

Click on any alert button to disable it. The alert will be grayed out to show that it has been disabled. Alerts will be delivered nightly after account information has been updated. Budget alerts will be grouped into one email. Other alerts will appear in separate emails.

Alerts are set up individually for specific actions/scenarios, so this will vary by user. Alerts are normally triggered when data is updated to Money Management during your login to digital banking or during nightly aggregation refreshes.

Each time you access Money Management, all of your accounts are refreshed for both your CCU accounts AND your outside accounts.