How to use MoneyCue

Your first five minutes

When you open MoneyCue for the first time you get two choices.

• Start fresh — an empty app, ready for your own records. MoneyCue asks a few short questions: your name, your usual income, the bills you already know about, a rough monthly budget and your current balance. Every one of them can be skipped and changed later.
• Explore with sample data — loads a realistic year of spending, bills, budgets and goals so you can poke around a fully populated app before committing to anything.

Reading the home screen

The big number is Safe to Spend. It is not your balance. It's what's left after MoneyCue subtracts the bills still to come this month and anything you've set aside for savings goals — so it's money you can spend without quietly borrowing from a bill.

Tap See how this is worked out and MoneyCue shows you the whole sum, line by line. Nothing is hidden, and if the number looks wrong you can see exactly which figure is causing it.

Adding what you spend

Three ways, whichever suits the moment:

1. The keypad. Tap Add, punch in the amount, pick a category. Six seconds.
2. Plain words. Type "42.50 at the corner shop for groceries" and MoneyCue pulls apart the amount, the shop, the category and the date, then shows you the result to check before saving.
3. Your voice. Tap the microphone and say it out loud. Same thing, hands free.

MoneyCue learns where you shop. Once you've filed H-E-B under Groceries a couple of times, it will suggest that category by itself — from your own history, not from a list someone else wrote.

Bills that look after themselves

Add a bill once, with how often it repeats, and MoneyCue works out every future date from there. It'll show what's due in the next fortnight on your home screen, put it on the calendar, and — if you'd like — send a reminder a couple of days before.

Mark a bill paid when it goes out, or skip it if it didn't. MoneyCue never guesses that a bill was paid.

Budgets without the nagging

Set an overall monthly budget, per-category budgets, or neither. As a category fills up MoneyCue shades the bar and mentions it — it will never tell you off for buying lunch.

If your money arrives on the 15th rather than the 1st, change Month start day in Settings and every budget, total and recap follows your pay cycle instead of the calendar.

Asking MoneyCue

The MoneyCue tab answers questions in ordinary language:

• "How much did I spend on dining this month?"
• "When is my next car payment?"
• "What's my year-to-date income?"
• "Where could I cut back?"
• "How am I doing compared to last month?"

Every answer carries a What this is based on line so you can see which of your records it used. MoneyCue works out the figures itself and only uses Apple Intelligence to understand the question and put the answer into words — so it can't invent a number it doesn't have.

Savings goals

Give a goal a name, a target and — if you like — a date. MoneyCue tracks what you've put in, works out the pace you'd need to hit the target, and tells you plainly if that pace isn't realistic. Money assigned to goals is taken out of Safe to Spend, so saving actually shows up in the number you look at every day.

Making it yours

• Appearance — light, dark, or follow your iPhone. Dark mode is designed, not dimmed.
• Coin sound at launch — on by default. It respects your silent switch and never plays over music.
• Face ID lock — off by default; turn it on in Privacy. Amounts are also hidden in the app switcher.
• Currency — set once, applied everywhere.
• Notifications — bills due, budget check-ins, goal milestones, monthly recap. All optional, all off until you say so.

Getting your data out

Two exports live in Settings → Data: a CSV of your transactions for a spreadsheet, and a full JSON backup of everything. Both go through the normal share sheet, so you choose where they end up.

Something not covered here?