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Getting the most out of Sahidha

A short, practical guide to running your household’s money through Sahidha — from your first account to asking it questions in plain English.

Household finance, in one place·Built for Indian families·Financial year Apr–Mar

Quick start

7 steps, once

This is the exact checklist Sahidha shows a brand-new family on its dashboard. Work through it top to bottom and everything else in this guide will make more sense.

1

Add your first account

A bank account, credit card, or wallet — anything Sahidha should track. This gives every transaction somewhere to live.

Sidebar → Accounts & lists → Accounts
2

Import a bank statement

Drop in a PDF or Excel statement from your bank and Sahidha parses every line for you — the fastest way to back-fill months of history. Prefer typing things in? Use New entry instead.

Sidebar → Transactions → Import statement
3

Categorize what came in

Sort spending into categories — groceries, rent, salary. Sahidha starts suggesting the right one after the first few, so this gets faster as you go.

Sidebar → Transactions → Categorize
4

Set a budget

A whole-family or per-member monthly budget. The dashboard quietly flags it the moment you overshoot — no digging required.

Sidebar → Reports → Budgets
5

Add insurance & investments

Policies, premiums, mutual funds, stocks, fixed deposits — put them on record so nothing quietly lapses or matures unnoticed.

Sidebar → Accounts & lists → Insurance / Investments
6

Invite the rest of the family

Admins see and manage everything; members manage their own. Everyone works from the same numbers instead of five different spreadsheets.

Sidebar → Settings — family admin only
7

Fit the categories to your household

Sahidha seeds the common categories on day one. Rename, add, or split them until they match how your family actually talks about money.

Sidebar → Settings — family admin only

Transactions

6 screens

Where money actually gets recorded, tidied, and reconciled. Everything here shares one ledger, so an entry made by hand shows up right alongside one pulled from a statement.

New entry

Add one transaction by hand

The fastest path for a cash payment or anything that won't show up on a statement. Pick an account, an amount, a category — done.

Import statement

Bring in a whole statement at once

Upload a PDF or Excel from your bank. Sahidha recognises your bank's layout and turns every row into a transaction, skipping ones it's already seen.

Categorize

Sort spending into categories

A focused queue for anything still uncategorized, with a suggestion ready to accept or override on each one.

Find transfers

Spot money moving between your own accounts

Matches a debit in one account to the matching credit in another, so an internal transfer never gets miscounted as spending.

Transactions

The full, searchable ledger

Every transaction across every account — filter by date, account, category, or member.

Cross-payments

Track who paid for what across the family

One member covers a bill for another — log it here so it settles cleanly instead of living in someone's memory.

Reports & budgets

4 screens

The same ledger, viewed from further back — for the questions that need a month or a year in frame, not a single entry.

Income & Expenditure

What came in, what went out

A category-by-category breakdown for any period — the household equivalent of a P&L.

Budgets

Set a ceiling, get a warning

Annual or per-member budgets per category. The dashboard surfaces an overshoot the moment it happens.

Net worth

Everything you own, minus everything you owe

Accounts, investments, and insurance surrender value on one side; loans and credit-card balances on the other. Admin view.

Reports

Built for the Indian financial year

Every report is scoped April–March, matching how you'll actually need the numbers at tax time.

Accounts & lists

7 screens

The standing records behind the ledger — what you hold, what covers you, and who else is involved.

Accounts

Every bank account, card, and loan

The source for every transaction and the backbone of net worth.

Investments

Stocks, mutual funds, FDs, PPF, gold

Invested amount against current value, SIPs, maturity dates — one place instead of a folder of statements.

Insurance

Every policy, before it lapses

Life, health, term, motor — sum assured, premium, and the date it's next due.

Entities

HUFs, trusts, and businesses the family runs

Give a family-run entity its own accounts, managed by whoever in the family looks after it.

Kutumb

Link finances across two households

For an extended family running two Sahidha families that occasionally share an account or a bill.

Contacts

The people behind the paperwork

Relationship managers, insurance agents, advisors — attach them directly to the account they look after.

To-dos

The financial admin that isn't a transaction

“Renew the health policy,” “Review the SIP” — assign it to a member and it won't get lost in a chat thread.

Family & sharing

who sees what

Sahidha is built for a whole household, not one login — this is how visibility actually works.

Family Hub

What your people are posting

The one screen that isn't about money: each member's latest public post — YouTube, X, Substack and more — gathered in one place.

Sharing

Grant a member visibility, account by account

An account's owner decides who else can see it. A shared account is visible to everyone it's shared with — never assumed.

Settings

Invite members, shape categories, run the family

Family-admin territory: who's in the family, what the categories are called, and the account's finer settings.

Ask Sahidha

Instead of hunting through screens, you can just ask.

Built in

Ask about your accounts, spending, insurance…

Ask Sahidha sits at the top of the sidebar. Type a question in plain English — “How much did we spend on groceries last month?”, “When does the health policy renew?” — and it answers from your family’s own data. It only ever reads; it never changes anything on its own.

For Claude & ChatGPT

Talk to your finances from an AI assistant you already use

Sahidha can also connect as a read-only data source inside Claude or ChatGPT, so you can ask it questions the same way you’d ask about anything else:

  1. In Claude, add a connector pointing at mcp.sahidha.com
  2. Sign in with your Sahidha account — or choose Try the read-only demo if you just want to explore first
  3. Ask it anything about your money, right there in the chat

Questions people actually ask

Do I have to import a statement, or can I just type things in?+

Either works, and most families do both. Import statement is faster for months of back-history; New entry is fine for the odd cash payment or a one-off you want logged immediately.

Can my spouse or kids see everything I do?+

Only what's shared with them. Every account has an owner, and that owner decides who else can see it under Sharing. Nothing is visible by default just because you're in the same family.

What happens if I import the same statement twice?+

Nothing bad — Sahidha recognises transactions it's already recorded and skips them, so a duplicate upload is safe.

Is my financial year set up correctly for India?+

Yes — every report, budget, and figure in Sahidha is scoped to the Indian financial year, April to March, by default.

Can Ask Sahidha or the Claude connector change my data?+

No. Both are strictly read-only — they can answer questions from your data, but neither can add, edit, or delete a transaction.