Skip to content
Share
Explore
Support
Help & FAQs
Help & FAQs
General
What is the “Wiserdime Personal Finance Template” Coda doc?
The Wiserdime Personal Finance Template is a Coda doc that contains simple & powerful personal finance tools.
This template lets people:
This doc uses the Wiserdime Coda pack to connect
with the Wiserdime mobile app [
] [] which lets you pull in your account and transaction data automatically on an ongoing basis. This makes financial planning a snap.Is there a Video Tutorial
You know it:
Can I change or delete X feature?
Absolutely, but just know it could break other features if you make changes.
It is not recommended to change or delete either the or tools since they are fundamental to many of the other tools in the doc, though you could make many additive changes without fear of breaking anything.
If you are looking for a specific feature that the doc doesn’t offer, consider telling us in the section.
You can safely delete the following pages to clean up your workspace, but make sure you won’t want the content later on before you delete them:
I don’t like the template but I love the Wiserdime Coda Pack because it lets me get my account and transaction data automatically. Can I make my own doc and keep using the Wiserdime Coda Pack?
Definitely. , and then add the Wiserdime Coda Pack to your custom doc to pull in your account and transaction data automatically. Also, consider telling us what you didn’t like about the doc in the section.
You can use this video tutorial to set up Wiserdime and connect it to Coda:
Dashboard
What is the Dashboard used for?
At a glance you can see:
To unlock the full power of the dashboard will require providing the following data:
Accounts
What is the Accounts tool used for?
It is also where you can view your account data that is automatically pulled in from the Wiserdime Coda Pack.
Which kinds of accounts go here?
This tool treats assets and liabilities as accounts. You can input your other kinds of account balances to contribute towards your Net Worth calculation that you see on the dashboard, including retirement accounts, investment accounts, and the value of physical assets, like real estate.
Accounts handles liabilities, such as credit accounts and loans. You can optionally include these accounts, and most of these will be available to pull in automatically if you sign up for a Wiserdime account.
Your “Net Worth” calculation won’t be accurate without recording all of your assets and liabilities as account records.
Net Worth doesn’t seem to be accurate.
If your net worth still seems inaccurate after syncing your accounts from Wiserdime to this doc, there are a few things that might be causing it:
If your account balance is not accurate for any particular account you can modify it by putting the correct value in “Manual Balance”. This figure will be deleted when the correct value comes in from Wiserdime.
Transactions
What is the Transactions tool used for?
This tool lets you see your that you have automatically pulled in using the Wiserdime Coda Pack from your Wiserdime account. If you don’t have Wiserdime connected to the template, the tool won’t display anything unless you manually create a transaction.
Income
What is the Income tool used for?
The income tool is used to record your different income streams and then forecast them into the future for usage in the tool as transactions. Cash Flow won’t work without providing income information.
What do the different colors mean in the fields?
The colors are based on the selected frequency for the income. Red means the field is not applicable for the selected frequency. Yellow means entry is required.
For example, for a “Monthly” income frequency, you would only need to provide the day the income goes into the account each month.
Another example, for a “Weekly” or “Biweekly” frequency, you only need to provide the most recent income date.
How do I forecast the income?
When you have finished inputting all your recurring income streams, you can click the button that says “Forecast & Update Income” in order to get it to show up in the tool.
You will have to click this button any time you add a new income stream or modify one.
How do I delete an income stream?
You can either delete the income record in “Income” or simply mark it as “Inactive” by checking the “Inactive?” box on the record.
Credit Payments
What is the Credit Payments tool used for?
The credit payments tool is used to record your monthly credit payments and then forecast them into the future for usage in the tool. Cash Flow will work without recording credit payments but might be inaccurate if you pay for some budget items with a credit card, and then use another account to pay off your credit card on a monthly basis.
It is recommended to fill out the and records before you use the Credit Payments tool, because it will be most effective if you link the budget items you are paying with your credit accounts. You can also create a credit payment series that is not linked to any budget items and just provide a manual recurring amount.
What if I need to edit a credit payment series?
There is no current way to edit credit payment series and have those changes automatically update your forecasted transactions. Instead, you will need to delete the current series and make a new one with your desired data.
Check the “Delete Credit Payment” box, then click the red button to delete the series, and then add the new, modified series. The old projections will be deleted from the transactions list within the hour, or you can go to the “Delete Orphaned Credit Payments” automation in the settings and run it manually by clicking “Test Rule” if you need them cleared right away.
Budget
What is the Budget tool used for?
The Budget tool is used to create a monthly budget.
You can use the budget tool to assign a job to every dollar you earn. This is calculated for you if you fill out the tool.
If you have integrated this doc with your Wiserdime account, you will be able to track your spending against your budget automatically, and send yourself alerts about your budget vs spending.
You can also use the budget tool to assign which accounts will be used to go towards each budget item. For example, some people like to put recurring bills on credit cards that have cash back rewards, and then pay the card off in full at the end of each month.
Assigning accounts to budget items will allow you to do detailed projections for each of your accounts.
You can create budget items using a variety of categories, name them whatever you like, and assign a “monthly budget item amount” and a “day” to them.
When you have finished making your budget, or editing any existing budget items, you can click the “Update Forecasted Transactions” button at the top of the screen to forecast your spend in the tool.
What are budget alerts?
Budget alerts are email notification that are sent to you when spend in a particular budget category reaches a certain amount.
Budget alerts are created by default when you make a new budget item. To turn this off, go to and uncheck the box.
You can read more about budget alerts in the Alerts section below.
How do I edit a budget item?
Go to , and find the budget item you are looking for in the list. You can edit any details of your budget item, including the description, monthly amount, account, and the day it normally comes out of your account. To do this, hover over the budget item and you should see an icon with two arrows appear. Click on that to expand the record, and from there, review & edit any details you need.
How do I mark a budget item inactive?
Go to , expand the record you want to mark inactive, and find the “Budget Item is Inactive?” check box. Click the box. This will deactivate the budget item for now, but it will preserve your data in case you need to activate it again in the future.
If you deactivate your budget item, it will also mark any forecasted transactions related to that item as inactive as well, which will remove them from the cash flow calculation.
Cash Flow
What is the Cash Flow tool used for?
The cash flow tool lets you see all your accounts’ balances for up to a year in the future.
This is possible through a combination of , , , and (optionally) .
Using the Budget, Income, and Credit Payments tools creates “transaction forecasts”, which are anticipated transactions that will process on an account on a predicted day.
Before using the tool, make sure your account balances are accurate, either through connecting to your accounts automatically through the Wiserdime Coda Pack, or by manually providing your account balances in the tool.
You can use the drop down menu at the top of the page to select which account you want to see balances for.
What do the text colors mean?
In the “Projected Adjustment” column, red means the account balance will go down, and green means it will go up.
In the “Projected Balance” column, green is for any value over $1,000.00, yellow is for any value between $0 and $1,000.00, and anything below $0 is red.
If you are viewing a normal depository account, such as a checking or savings account, a red projected balance means the account is projected to be negative on that day, and this can help you understand if you need to reduce spending, transfer money, or use a different account for some of your transactions up to that point.
What if a transaction has the wrong amount / date or is no longer planned?
If the transaction is no longer planned you can delete it by hovering over the transaction bubble, expanding it by clicking the arrows in the window that appears, and then opening the menu in the top right and selecting the delete option. If the transaction is part of a budget item that is no longer valid, read below.
If the transaction has a wrong amount because it is a budget item and your budget is changed, you can automatically update all your projected transactions by going to the related budget item in , changing the amount to what it needs to be, and then clicking the “Update Forecasted Transactions” button. This will keep you from having to individually update the 12 transaction records corresponding with the budget item. This method will also work for changing the day of the month the transaction will come out. You can also deactivate a budget item that is no longer valid by finding and clicking the “Budget Item is Inactive?” box and then clicking the “Update Forecasted Transactions” button. The tool will then no longer consider those transactions.
If the transaction was added manually as a one-off and needs to change, you can simply open the transaction record and edit any of the details that need to be different. For example, this might happen frequently with your if there is some variance in your transaction amounts from month to month - like with groceries or utilities spending.
Retirement
What is the Retirement tool used for?
The tool is an optional tool that can help you quantify your retirement goal and see if your savings rate is enough to give you the amount of money you need by your target retirement year and retirement duration.
In order to use the Retirement tool, you will need to first fill out your and , which will contain the information about your intended savings.
Once these are filled out, you can input your target retirement year, your anticipated annual budget, your anticipated portfolio growth by % each year, and your anticipated retirement duration. You can also indicate whether or not you want to include physical asset value in your retirement value.
At the end, you will get a calculation of a surplus or shortfall, using the information you provided about your current balances from , your savings plans from , and the additional data you input above.
If there is a shortfall, you can reason out what changes you might need to make in order to produce a surplus.
You can make multiple different retirement scenarios. When you found one you want to use as your goal, you can check the box called “Set as chosen scenario” and this data will be used to populate the values.
Alerts
What is an Alert?
An alert is a configurable notification to your Coda account and via email (if the user’s Coda settings are set to do so) that triggers based on account and transaction activity.
Alerts are designed to give you unprecedented visibility into the state of your finance in a way that is more convenient than actively monitoring your finances on a daily basis.
How do I turn on email notifications for Coda?
How Do I Make an Alert?
Go to the Alerts page, find the subpage that corresponds with the type of alert you want to make, and click the button on that page to create a new alert.
What Kind of Alerts Are There?
Account Balance Alert
Account balance alerts let you monitor your account balances and receive notifications in the event your account goes above or below a certain value that you specify.
We predict the most common kinds of alerts will use the “less than or equal to” operator to check when an account hits a low value that warrants observation, such as a checking account hitting a low value.
Manage your existing alerts by searching in the box in the list on the page.
You can silence an alert by clicking on the record you want to edit and checking the “Silence Alert?” box.
Write a custom message for your alert using the “Custom Message” box if you are familiar with Coda. If you mess up, just delete what you wrote and your alert will go back to normal.
Credit Limit Alert
This page allows you to create and manage credit limit alerts.
You can silence an alert by clicking on the record you want to edit and checking the “Silence Alert?” box.
Write a custom message for your alert using the “Custom Message” box if you are familiar with Coda. If you mess up, just delete what you wrote and your alert will go back to normal.
Similar to an account balance alert, you can set an alert for credit cards to monitor how close your balance is to the credit account’s limit.
This is done using a comparison in percentages rather than mathematical operators like the balance alert. For example, you can set up an alert to see when your balance exceeds 80% of your limit.
Monthly Budget vs Spend Alert
This page allows you to create and manage budget vs spend alerts.
Manage your existing alerts by searching in the box in the list on the page.
You can silence an alert by clicking on the record you want to edit and checking the “Silence Alert?” box.
Write a custom message for your alert using the “Custom Message” box if you are familiar with Coda. If you mess up, just delete what you wrote and your alert will go back to normal.
This alert tells you when you are approaching or have exceeded your monthly budget in a particular category. It can be configured against the actual budget amount, which is the default option, or you can set a custom amount if you want a different level of visibility into your spending. This custom amount can be lower or higher than the budgeted amount, though most applications will use a lower custom amount, for example, when wanting to know if you have spent ~80% of your budget for the month.
The spending against each budgeted amount resets each calendar month without any further action needed. You can also edit budget amounts without needing to change the budget alert, unless you have set a custom amount, in which case you might want to revisit the alert to make sure it still makes sense for your scenario.
What is a Comparison?
For account balance and budget alerts you can set an alert threshold and a comparison operator that will evaluate against your current balance or budget.
The comparison operator is one of the common operators in math for evaluating one value against another and includes:
An example of how a comparison works is to think about an alert where you would want to know if your account balance goes below $500. You would set up an alert threshold of $500 and use the “less than or equal to” comparison operator. You can hover over an operator to see a description of it.
For credit alerts, there is a separate operator of percentages that compares the balance against a credit limit, and those are canned to percentages in tens, such as sending an alert when your balance reaches 80% of your credit limit.
What is Alert Frequency?
Alert Frequency is a way to specify how many times you want to be alerted while the condition of your alert is true.
There are two types of alert frequencies:
Once Only means you will only receive an alert one time while the alert condition is true. Example:
Your Once Only alert is configured for when your checking account goes below $250. Once it alerts a single time, it will not alert again until your balance goes back above $250 and then goes below $250 a second time.
Once Per Day means you will get an alert daily while the alert condition is true. Example:
Your alert is configured for when your checking account goes below $250. It will continue to send you an alert one time each day until your checking account balance returns above $250, at which point it will stop alerting you daily until your checking account goes below $250 a second time.
Configurations
What is the Configurations tool?
The configurations tool is a place to control preferences for the Wiserdime doc.
Admin
What is Admin used for?
This section is where all of the core data is stored that powers the doc. There are several tables in here that are also dedicated to automation, such as those that make alerts work.
In general, you can come to this section to modify data in the tables directly.
As a word of caution, some tables are just for helping certain features work. If you intend to edit a table, make sure you won’t unintentionally break something. You may consider making a backup copy of your template before you make edits, just in case.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.