Questions & answers

A macOS personal finance app. You import a bank statement, AI categorizes every transaction, and Allocate shows your budgets, goals, spending, and net worth — all on your Mac.

It’s free. No subscription, and no paid bank connectors.

No. There’s no login, no email, and no Allocate account. The app works the moment you open it.

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. An iPhone version is planned for a future release.

No. Instead of a bank login, you export a statement (PDF, CSV, or Excel) and drop it in. Nothing connects to your bank, and there are no connector fees.

PDF, CSV, and Excel (.xlsx) statements — and you can import several at once, assigning each to the right account.

Import every account you actually move money through — checking, savings, investments, bill-paying, and credit cards. Your rates and net worth are only accurate when all of them are present.

Allocate detects duplicates automatically and skips them, showing you how many it skipped. You can re-import freely without creating double entries.

No. The raw file is never stored — only the extracted transactions are kept on your device. Categorization runs on your Mac (or via your own ChatGPT account if you choose).

The AI labels each transaction by its purpose. Anything it gets wrong, you can override in one click — and teach it a rule so it’s right next time.

Yes. By default extraction runs locally on your Mac. Connecting your own ChatGPT account is an optional fallback, not a requirement.

A keyword rule matches text (e.g. “Rema 1000” → Groceries) instantly and deterministically. A natural-language rule describes intent in plain words and lets the AI apply it. On the Rules screen the two live in separate, collapsible sections.

Yes. Under Settings → Data you can type free-form instructions — “treat anything from Vipps as a transfer”, say — that the AI applies on top of your rules when categorizing. You can also export the full prompt it uses (built-in instructions plus your categories, rules, and custom instructions) as a Markdown file.

When a move shows up as a debit on one statement and a credit on another, Allocate pairs them automatically — opposite amounts, within a few days, on different accounts. If two moves could match, it asks you instead of guessing.

Yes. Open the transaction and use “Flip Sign” to switch it between money out and money in. On import, Allocate also reconciles the transactions against the statement’s balance and corrects stray sign errors on its own — flagging anything it can’t safely resolve for you to check.

A transfer into a savings or investment account is counted once as money saved, and the matching leg is filed under Transfers so it doesn’t double-count. A credit-card bill payment counts on neither leg — the card’s individual purchases already counted.

Open “Review transfers” to confirm, change, or unpair any match by hand. Auto-matching only happens when it’s unambiguous; everything is visible and reversible.

Yes. On any confirmed pair, “Reset to default” re-derives both legs from the accounts involved (Internal Transfer, Credit Card Payment, or a promoted Savings) while keeping the pairing. Settings → Transfers has a bulk “Reset to default” that does this for every confirmed pair at once. You can also filter the Transfers screen by account and change either side’s category right there.

A card’s balance counts as a liability against your net worth. You choose whether card spending lands in the month you bought (transaction month) or the month you’re billed (bill month) — globally, or per card.

From your own past spending, so the targets are realistic rather than wishful. You can recalculate them from your actuals over any period whenever you like.

The share of your income you actually kept — what you saved plus what you invested, divided by what you earned.

A goal works out how much to set aside each month, and you can apply that straight into the matching budget. If your plan falls short, Allocate flags it.

Net worth is the sum of your accounts’ balances, based on money in and out — not market value. So it can look low if you haven’t imported every account, haven’t set each account’s opening balance, or are skipping a recent statement (the balance lags by exactly that gap).

Yes. Import a brokerage statement and the Portfolio screen tracks each holding’s market value, cost basis, and return — in kroner and percent — with a performance chart over time. Prices refresh automatically, and your holdings feed into net worth, so a rising portfolio shows up as real gains rather than just the money you put in.

Yes. Net worth has a “Cash vs. invested” chart that separates the cash sitting in your accounts from the money you’ve invested, and totals them over time — so buying funds shows as invested instead of seeming to disappear.

Yes. The net-worth trend has a “By account” view that draws one line per account (when you have more than one). Hover any month for a tooltip of each account’s balance, and tap the legend to show or hide individual accounts.

Usually a missing opening balance or an un-imported statement on one account. Set each account’s starting balance and import its latest statement, and the figure updates.

On your Mac, using Apple’s SwiftData, and synced only through your own iCloud. There’s no Allocate server holding it.

Yes. Export your transactions (or all your data) to CSV anytime, and clear everything from the app whenever you want.