See everything you own and owe. Record your house, car, KiwiSaver, investments, mortgages, loans, insurance policies, and businesses or trusts. Swish adds it all up so you always know your net worth.
Introduction
Welcome to Swish.
Swish brings your whole financial picture into one place. Your bank accounts, the things you own, what
you owe, your insurance policies, your budget, and your savings goals — all connected, all up to date,
and all private.
What you can do with Swish
Connect your banks. Link your accounts once and Swish keeps balances and transactions current automatically. No more manual spreadsheets.
Budget from what you actually spend. Instead of asking you to guess, Swish looks at your last 90 days of real spending and builds your budget from there.
Set goals and track them. Save for a holiday, an emergency fund, a house deposit, or retirement — and see whether you are on track.
Never miss a renewal. Set reminders on insurance renewals, mortgage fixed-term expiries, and any other date that matters.
Key ideas
A few Swish-specific words that appear throughout this guide.
Registers
A register is your record of one kind of thing. Swish has four:
| Register | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Assets | Property, vehicles, investments, KiwiSaver, savings, valuables |
| Liabilities | Mortgages, personal loans, credit cards, hire purchase |
| Insurance | Life, health, house, contents, vehicle, income protection policies |
| Business/Trust | Companies, trusts, partnerships you have an interest in |
Each thing you add is a register item — your house is one item in the Assets register, and its
mortgage is one item in the Liabilities register.
Register items can be linked to each other. Link your house to its mortgage and its house insurance,
and Swish understands they belong together.
See About registers.
Linked accounts
When you connect a bank account, you can link it to a register item. Link your mortgage account to
the mortgage entry in your Liabilities register, and the balance updates itself.
See Linking accounts to registers.
Budget cycle
Your budget cycle is the period your budget runs over — weekly, fortnightly, or monthly — with a
rollover date when one cycle ends and the next begins. Choose whatever matches how you get paid.
Reserves
This is the idea that makes Swish's budget different from most.
In an ordinary budget, if you set $200 a month for car maintenance and spend nothing, that $200 vanishes
when the month ends. In Swish it becomes a reserve — money set aside that carries forward. Three
quiet months means $600 waiting when the car needs new tyres.
This is what makes bills like insurance, rates and car registration manageable — the ones that are owed
every cycle but only paid once or twice a year. See
Reserves and lumpy bills.
Reserves are also why Swish keeps a permanent record of every cycle in
Spend Overview.
Goals
A goal is something you are saving towards, with a target amount and a target date. Goals draw from
your linked accounts and can take a share of any surplus at the end of a cycle.
See Goals and account allocation.
Your encryption passphrase
Your passphrase is what keeps your financial information private — see below.
Your privacy
Swish cannot read your financial data. Nobody at Swish can.
Your account details, balances, transactions, register entries, notes, and uploaded documents are
encrypted in your browser, on your device, before they are ever sent to Swish's servers. The key that
unlocks them is created from your passphrase, and your passphrase never leaves your device.
What that means in practice:
- You will be asked for your passphrase every time you sign in. This is deliberate. Your key is not
stored anywhere that outlives your session. - If you forget your passphrase, your data cannot be recovered. Not by you, not by support, not by
anyone. There is no reset. Choose something you will remember, and store it somewhere safe.
See Your encryption passphrase — it is worth reading properly.
What you need
A web browser. Swish runs at your Swish web address in any modern browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox,
or Safari — on a computer or a tablet.
Coming soon. Swish apps for iPhone and Android are in development. For now, use Swish in a browser.
It works on a phone browser, but the experience is designed for a larger screen.
A Swish account. If you do not have one yet, see Getting started.
Your bank login details, if you want to connect accounts. Swish uses Akahu, a New Zealand
open-banking service, so you enter your bank details with your bank — never with Swish. See
Connecting your bank accounts.
Where to go next
If you are setting up for the first time, work through in order:
Getting started →
Your encryption passphrase →
First-time setup wizard.
If you are already set up and looking for something specific, the
full contents list is the fastest way in.