Wallets and bank accounts
The first step towards the full control of your expenses is that your every transaction must be recorded. Normally you have a bank account and some money in your pocket or in your wallet. If you have more bank accounts, then you are already an advanced player, congratulations! 
(This means that you have to subscribe to the advanced package in which you can connect as many bank accounts as you like – or at least as many as you have. )
Connect your bank account(s) and set up your wallet(s)!
When you have defined a bank account in Counter then it seems to be strange, but you are not allowed to register transactions on it. This happens because regularly your bank keeps the right of registering transactions on your account. What you can do is to download your transactions of your account through the internet-bank or through another interface and upload them into Counter. We do work on that you could connect your bank accounts online and refresh the data easily without downloads and uploads.
For the pocket expenses you can also define as many wallets as you need. For example, you can define different wallets for different currencies, or you can define separate wallets which you share with others. So, Counter is going to satisfy every requirement related to the number and usage of wallets and accounts.
Your wallets are available from your mobile phone as well. So, you can register your spending immediately and don’t have to force your memory later.
Shared wallets
Sometimes others are spending your money. If you have a family, then these are your children, if you have a company, then these are your colleagues. It is (was) still your money but you want them to let you know what they have spent it for. A shared wallet has one and only one owner who also manages the wallet. And a shared wallet can have as many users as the owner invites to spend the content of the wallet together. By the way – I almost forgot – the invited people can also earn money for the shared wallet or make transfers between their own accounts and the shared one.
Labelling
The tracking of the expenses is a greater experience if you not simply observe them but rather categorize and analyse your expenses. For this purpose, Counter provides you with an effective labelling tool. Hopefully for the first time many of your expenses will be already automatically and correctly categorised. The rest you must do yourself, but next time the Counter will remember your categorisation, and the same transactions, with the same partners will be labelled the same automatically. Month by month there will be less and less transaction which can not be categorized automatically. After uploading your transactions, the list of “others” will be shorter and shorter, and you will spend your time with the supervision of the categorisation and with analyses rather than with the categorisation itself. Labelling is the starting point of your financial analyses.
Multidimensional labels
This service helps you to avoid overlapping labels. I guess you have never thought that you should avoid them. Let us explain it!
In the nature it is easy to avoid overlapping. In our three-dimensional world the tree and the house behind it are distinct. On a two-dimensional picture a part of the building is hidden behind the tree. Or if we take the picture from the other side of the building then the tree is invisible. Normally our cost structure is also multidimensional as our real world is. A cost has at least a purpose, a beneficiary and a service or asset type. If we try to put them in one dimension, then we must decide that which dimension is the most important for us (which one is in the foreground, where do we take the picture from). Or in a worse case we will mix the dimensions and overlap our labels – as it is described here, where we are talking about the standards of usage.
Our multidimensional labelling system will help you to keep your cost and income categories distinct, which is one of the most important rules of financial tracking.
User defined labels
If you need more dimensions – label categories – and more labels than the pre-set, then you can define as many as you would like.
Profiles
Let’s suppose that you have both a family and a company, then the structure of the expenses in them probably very different. Therefore, you need different labels and dimensions to organise them. You don’t have to register twice or more to achieve this. You can create profiles and assign different set of accounts and different sets of labels to them. Even sometimes when you would like you can see the whole picture despite it consists of very different entities. The family and the company are the most common usage of profiles and were just an example. You can use profiles for lots of other purposes.
Reports
There are usually some aspects that you want to analyse regularly. For example, you bought a new, modern heating system into your house which can regulate everything you can imagine and more. You wonder whether you can achieve the expected energy saving with it. Therefore, you would like to see month by month your energy costs and compare it to the same costs a year before. After you have set up the filters (purpose: accommodation, service: energy) you can save the setting and when you want to check the numbers next month you can simply open the already saved report with the additional data of the last month.
Personal balance sheet
Companies declare their balance sheet every year to inform their partners, shareholders, buyers and everyone who is interested in it about their actual financial and asset status. Individuals have no obligations to declare their balance sheet, so they don’t even prepare it for themselves. However, most of us will be surprised when we create it. And not about that what we have but about what we miss. The main advantage of the balance sheet is that the depreciation of your assets is calculated in it. In that way the balance sheet will force you to plan your maintenance costs into your budget. The value of your home – the real estate and the furniture – is continuously decreasing day by day, month by month. You must have regular savings to compensate depreciation otherwise the total value of the assets owned by you will decrease and hopefully it will disturb you. OK, the easiest solution is to unsubscribe from Continuity not letting you to make embarrassed. 😊 But the other solution is to keep your balance sheet in balance! And this is what we would like to support.