To help you get your transactions from your online banking, we've put together some step-by-step guides for each of the banks we support.

You can open the help file in a pop-up window, and have it sit alongside your online banking browser window, so you can follow the steps easily and get the files you need.

The Money tracker gives the most accurate picture of your finances when you have at least a month's worth of transactions loaded. The longer the date range the better.

To help you manage larger amounts of transaction data, the Money tracker will automatically group transactions when they are close together in date. Any files with a gap or less than a week between the end and start days will group together.

For example if you upload transactions from the end of September, and then some from early October, they will group together as September-October.

If you upload a file and can’t see it under Saved transactions, check the dates on the transaction periods, it may have joined an existing group.

Once your data is in the Money tracker, it doesn't matter where it has come from. The tracker accepts data from a number of different banks, and different types of account, for example cheque/daily accounts, or credit cards, or savings.

If you want to track multiple accounts, just upload them one at a time. The transactions are initially sorted by date, so that the different accounts will merge to show as one group of data. This means you can keep track of all your spending, no matter where its from.

If you have an account type we don't seem to have, email us and we'll work to get it for you.

You can sort your transactions by Description, or by any of the headings with an arrow next to them. This makes it easy to find specific transactions when you have a lot loaded.

It also makes it easy to select groups of transactions - for example all the ones from the supermarket - and put them into the same category all at once. It's a good way to get a whole month's worth of transactions tracked quickly.

You can use the Select box on the far right to select more than one transaction at a time. When you choose a Category or Sub-category for one transaction, you can apply that to all of them at once. Use this with sorting for a fast way to categorise lots of transactions.

If you don't mind scrolling, or have a tall computer screen, you can choose to show up to 50 rows on a page when you are at Step 2. This is a good way to sort through lots of transactions, especially if you're going back to look at ones you've already put in categories to fine tune the results.

Sometimes you want to add a row, to bring in a one-off payment from another account or to split a transaction.

Click the (+) icon on the right of the row to add a new blank row underneath. You can then enter the details of the transaction manually.

Some transactions, like getting cash out of the ATM, or a credit card payment, actually have the money being used for more than one category. If you want to split a transaction you can add a row and then add a description, before adjusting the amounts yourself.

For example, if you have a transaction showing $100 you took out from an ATM, you might have used $20 for a gift, and spent the rest on groceries. Add a row, enter a new description for the $20, put the $20 in as the amount and categorise it as Miscellaneous > Gifts > Family. Don't forget to adjust the first amount to cover the difference - so change the $100 to $80, then categorise it as Groceries > Supermarket.

The Update page button will keep any changes you've made even if you move to another page. But any changes you make won't be saved permanently until you Save to My Sorted.

In the Money tracker you can save to My Sorted at any time, so we recommend you save often to make sure you don't lose any work.

You can pick the date range for the graphs on this page.

For example, If you choose dates covering your pay period, you can see where your money goes from pay to pay.

If you have less than 2 months of transactions loaded, a weekly period gives you good detail on the transactions. If you have longer periods loaded, monthly means you can see more at a glance.

The pie chart is a good way to see where your money is going. If you have more than one column in your Summary table, you can click the pie icon in each column to see a specific breakdown for that column only.

This is especially useful to quickly click through the columns and see if there are any sudden changes in spending, or one area that stands out as an issue. You can then go back and sort by dates to find out if something has been put in the wrong category, or get more detail from the description.

This graph automatically adjusts to show all your income and spending for the period you picked. You should aim to have the income bar higher than the spending bars - it's always better to spend less than you earn.

If you think that copying your transactions to a budget looks complicated, take it one step at a time. Getting real amounts from actual transactions into your budget can be a great way to help you get sorted.

This screen works from top to bottom, so just choose the option that looks best at each step. Don't worry if you copy amounts over to a budget and don't want to keep the result - if you don't save the updated budget to My Sorted nothing will have changed.

Even when you do save to My Sorted, a new version of the budget is created, so you won't lose any budgets you've already made.

Our estimate for regular fixed amounts like your take-home pay may vary from the actual amounts in your transaction file. These amounts should be entered directly into the Budget calculator rather than using the estimate from the Money tracker.