SikaNomics is a user-friendly personal finance app. It helps you record your money, plan your spending, and understand your habits — all in one simple, private place. This section explains the basics and the main money ideas you will meet everywhere in the app.

Creating your account

Tap Get Started on the home page or go to the signup page. You can register with an email and password, or sign in with Google in one click. It is completely free with no paid plans. You can also try the app as a guest without signing up — anything you add in guest mode is kept only for that session.

The dashboard

After you sign in, you land on the Dashboard. It is the home screen that gives you a snapshot of your finances at a glance:

• Total Income — everything you have earned.
• Total Expenses — everything you have spent.
• Balance — your income minus your expenses (what is left over).
• Budget Overview — how you are doing against your budgets.
• Insights — charts and a breakdown of your top spending categories.
• Recent Transactions — your latest activity.

Hover over (or tap) the info icon on the income, expense, and balance cards to see a short explanation of what each number means.

Three simple money words

• Income — money that comes in, like a salary or a gift.
• Expense — money that goes out, like rent or groceries.
• Balance — income minus expenses. A positive balance means you have money left; a negative one means you spent more than you earned.

A transaction is simply one entry of money moving in or out. It is the heart of SikaNomics — budgets, insights, and reports are all built from your transactions.

Adding a transaction

Go to the Transactions page and tap New Transaction. Then choose:

• Type — whether it is income or an expense.
• Amount — how much money.
• Category — what it is for (like Food, Transport, Rent, or Salary). The picker searches as you type, so you can find any category in a few keystrokes.
• Currency — which currency the money is in.
• Date — when it happened.
• Notes — an optional short reminder, like "Lunch with friends".

Tap Save and it appears in your feed right away.

Categories

Categories help you group your spending so you can understand it. For income, common categories include Salary, Freelance, Investment, and Gift. For expenses, they include Food, Transport, Shopping, Bills, Rent, Health, and more.

Finding, editing, and deleting

Use the search box and filters to find transactions by keyword, category, type, or date. Tap any transaction to open it, where you can edit its details or delete it. Deleting removes it permanently, and if it was linked to a goal, that goal is also updated.

A recurring transaction is a rule that repeats on a schedule, so you do not have to remember to add it every time.

How it works

Create a recurring rule for things like weekly allowances, monthly rent, or annual insurance. Choose how often it repeats — daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, or yearly — and SikaNomics automatically turns each scheduled occurrence into a real transaction on the correct date.

Examples of what to automate

• Monthly — rent, gym membership, phone bill.
• Weekly / two-weekly — a salary or allowance.
• Yearly — car insurance or a subscription renewed once a year.

Pausing and managing rules

Open the Recurring page to see all your rules, their next due dates, and which are active. You can pause a rule (for example, while on holiday), edit it, or delete it. When a rule reaches its end date, it is deactivated automatically.

A budget is a spending limit you set for a category over a period of time (weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly). It tells you how much you plan to spend, so you can keep your spending in check.

Creating a budget

Go to the Budgets page and choose New Budget. Give it a title, pick the category and period, and set the amount you want to allow. As you log expenses in that category, SikaNomics tracks how much you have used.

Understanding the status

Each budget card shows a progress bar and a color that tells you where you stand:

• Green (Under) — you have used less than 80% of your limit.
• Orange (Warning) — you have used at least 80% and are getting close.
• Red (Over) — you have used 100% or more and have gone over your limit.

Each card also shows how much of the period remains, so you know how much time is left to stick to your plan.

A goal is a financial target you want to reach. There are two types: Savings (build up money, like an emergency fund or a new phone) and Debt (pay off money you owe, like a loan).

Creating a goal

Go to the Goals page and create a new goal. You set a target amount, a deadline, and a priority (low, medium, or high). SikaNomics works out a monthly target — how much you need to save or pay each month to stay on track.

Adding contributions

Each time you add money toward your goal, you record a contribution. Your progress bar fills up and SikaNomics tracks how close you are to your deadline. When you reach your target, the goal is marked completed.

Tracking contributions

Open a goal to see your full contribution history, your current amount, and how much time is left. You can undo a contribution if you made a mistake. A small savings contribution can also be created directly from the new transaction screen.

The Debts & IOUs page tracks two things: money you lent out (people owe you) and money you borrowed (you owe them).

The accounting rule it follows

Lending or borrowing money is not income and not an expense — it is money changing hands that later comes back or gets paid off. SikaNomics keeps these balances on their own page so they never inflate or deflate your income statement. Only three entries count as real income or expense, and SikaNomics logs them automatically to your income statement when you record them:

• Interest you earn on money you lent (logged as Interest Earned income) or pay on money you borrowed (logged as Interest Paid expense).
• Write-offs — when you give up on recovering a loan (logged as a Bad Debt expense/loss).
• Forgiven debts — when a debt you owed is cancelled (logged as Debt Forgiven income).

So your income statement always reflects the interest you actually earn and pay, plus the gain or loss from settled write-offs and forgiveness — and it never counts the principal itself, keeping receivables and payables on the balance-sheet view where they belong. Deleting the entry (or the whole debt) removes its automatic income-statement record too.

Creating a debt

Go to the New Debt page, choose the person, the direction (you lent it or you borrowed it), the amount, and the currency. You can add an optional interest rate, a due date, and notes. The money you lent or borrowed is recorded once as the opening balance — it never touches income or expenses.

The activity log

Open any debt to record every movement: repayments received, extra money lent, repayments you made, interest earned or paid, and write-offs or forgiven amounts. Each entry updates the outstanding balance automatically, and when the balance reaches zero the debt is marked settled.

Overdue tracking

If you set a due date and the balance is still owing after it, the debt is flagged overdue on the list and dashboard so you remember to follow up.

SikaNomics keeps a streak for the days you actually manage your money. It is a record of consistency, not a score, and it exists to answer one question quickly: am I still going?

What counts as a day

A day is banked when you do something that makes your picture more accurate:

• log a transaction
• set or adjust a budget
• contribute to a savings goal
• update a debt balance
• import a bank statement

Simply opening the app does not count. A number that rewarded opening a page would measure nothing, and would make the streak meaningless to the one person trying hardest to build the habit.

Missing a day

You get one grace day per month. A single missed day is covered rather than fatal. A longer gap resets the current streak, but your best streak is kept — a bad month is not a reason to throw away the record.

Milestones and achievements

Your streak is celebrated at 3, 7, 14, 21, 30, 60, 100, 200 and 365 days. Alongside it are achievements for the habits that are harder to keep than logging — budgeting consistently, funding goals, paying down debt, importing statements, and showing up on weekends. Both are on the Habits page.

Your streak is also summarised on your dashboard, so you can check it without leaving the page you are already on.

Your timezone

Day boundaries follow the timezone in your notification settings, not a server default. If you are in Accra, a new day starts at midnight your time — so your streak never appears to break because of where the servers are.

The Insights page is like a personal money detective. It uses your transactions to show charts and smart alerts that help you understand your spending habits — not just list them.

Charts you will see

• Net cash flow — how your money changes over time.
• Income vs expenses — comparing what comes in and what goes out.
• Expense mix — a donut chart showing which categories you spend the most on.
• Spending by day — which days of the week you spend the most.

Smart insights

• Unusual spending alerts — flags when a category jumps by 20% or more compared with a previous period.
• Recurring charge detection — spots subscriptions and repeated payments, and even which ones appear to have stopped.
• Top merchants — the shops and services where you spend the most.
• Goal nudges — friendly suggestions like "Trim your Food spending by 10% to stay on track."
• Cash flow projection — an estimate of your money over the next month, flagging if you might run short.

Your Money Health score

SikaNomics gives you a Money Health score from 0 to 100, based on your savings rate, how well you stick to budgets, how steady your income is, and more. A higher score is better, and a trend tells you whether your finances are improving or declining.

You can change the time range (for example, last 3 months, this year, or a custom range) to see how your habits shift.

A report is a clean, printable summary of your entire finances for a period you choose. It is perfect for a monthly review or for sharing with someone (like an accountant or a partner).

Creating a report

Open the Reports page and pick a time range — this month, last month, the last 3 or 6 months, this year, all time, or a custom set of dates. Choose the sections to include and set the display currency, then the report is built for you instantly.

What a report can include

• Financial summary — income, expenses, net, and savings rate.
• Spending by category — how much went to each category.
• Transaction list — each transaction in the period.
• Budgets — how you performed against your limits.
• Goals — your progress toward targets.
• Recurring transactions — your active repeating rules.
• Insights — your Money Health score, top merchants, and patterns.

You can toggle each section on or off to build exactly the report you want, then use Save as PDF to download a clean version to save, print, or share.

SikaNomics supports more than 150 currencies, so you can record money in whatever currency it is actually in.

Your preferred currency

Set a preferred currency in your profile (for example, GHS, USD, EUR, or GBP). This is the currency your dashboard, totals, and reports are shown in by default.

How conversions work

If you record a transaction in a different currency than your preferred one, SikaNomics converts it using live exchange rates so all your totals are compared fairly. The Exchange Rates page lets you search any currency, see live rates, and convert amounts instantly with a built-in converter.

Notifications are helpful reminders SikaNomics can send you, so you stay on top of your money without constantly checking the app.

Turning notifications on and off

Open the Notifications page to manage everything in one place. You can switch notifications on or off entirely. Email alerts are delivered to the address on your account.

Kinds of alerts

• Budget alerts — when a budget is near its limit (for example, at 80%) or has been exceeded.
• Goal updates — when you reach a milestone (like 25%, 50%, or 75%) or complete a goal.
• Recurring reminders — when your scheduled payments are processed.
• Large transaction alerts — when a single transaction is bigger than an amount you set.
• Daily reminders — a gentle nudge if you have not logged anything that day.
• Monthly summary — a recap of your month on a day you choose.
• Login alerts — a heads-up when someone signs into your account, with the device and location. At most one an hour.
• Budget pacing — when the speed you are spending means the budget will run out before the period ends.
• Goal deadline risk — when a goal is trending behind its target date.
• Streak alerts — when a streak reaches a milestone, when today is about to be missed, and when a streak ends.
• Achievements — when you unlock a milestone for managing your money consistently.

The daily brief

This is the default way SikaNomics contacts you, and it replaces most individual emails. Once a day, at an hour you choose, you get one email covering what needs attention, how you are doing against your budgets, and a single suggested next step.

Lower-priority items — processed recurring bills and the end-of-day reminder — are folded into that brief instead of being emailed on their own. You can turn the brief off, in which case those items are emailed individually.

How many emails you will actually get

We think alert fatigue is a product fault, not a settings problem, so the default path is the quiet one. Three things keep the volume down:

• Repeated alerts are grouped, not repeated. Several large transactions in one day produce one email. So do several automated recurring bills. An alert about a goal being reached is sent once, not again if you top the goal up later.
• Duplicates are suppressed. The same alert cannot be sent twice inside its window.
• There is a hard ceiling. Whatever your settings, SikaNomics will never send you more than a fixed number of emails in a day. Anything held back is still recorded and visible in your in-app inbox — nothing is lost, it is just not emailed.

Money and security alerts are the exception to your daily limit: they are sent even when you have asked for fewer emails, because missing them is worse than receiving one. They are still subject to the hard daily ceiling.

Your notification inbox

The Notifications page is also an inbox where all your alerts are listed, with read and unread filters, so you can review past alerts any time.

Your Profile page is where you manage your account and personal details.

Managing your profile

• Edit your details — update your name and email.
• Change your preferred currency — remember to save your change.
• View your stats — a quick summary of your total income, expenses, balance, and transaction count.
• Theme — switch between light, dark, and automatic.

Signing out and deleting

You can sign out from the menu anytime and sign back in later. If you ever want to leave, you can delete your account permanently from the profile page. You will be asked to type "delete account" to confirm, to make sure it is intentional — this removes your account and your data.

Your privacy and security

Your data is protected with encryption while stored and while moving over the internet. You can sign in with an email and password or with Google, and login alerts let you know if someone accesses your account. Remember to use a strong password and keep it private.

The Learn page is a library of articles written to help you build better money habits — budgeting, saving, paying off debt, and improving your financial health.

How to use it

Browse articles by category, tap one to read it, and use the ideas in your own budget. Each article is short, practical, and written in plain English. Whether you are a complete beginner or want to sharpen your skills, there is something useful for you here.