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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ai2fin.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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What Lenses solves

You categorise a transaction once. But the way you want to look at your money changes constantly:
  • At tax time you need it grouped by deductible buckets.
  • During a project review you need to see only ClientX’s expenses.
  • Mid-month you want a quick scan of just personal spending.
  • At end-of-year you want a side-by-side freelance vs. employed income breakdown.
Without Lenses, that means either re-tagging hundreds of transactions, exporting four CSVs into a spreadsheet, or building four parallel category trees and keeping them in sync forever. Lenses fix this with one move: you keep a single category on each transaction, then pick a Lens in the top bar. Every page — Insight+, Expenses, Bills, Allocations, Travel — re-pivots instantly to that perspective. Switch back, and you’re seeing the full view again. Nothing was edited. No data was moved.

Open Lenses

Manage your Lenses on the Categories page → Lenses tab. Switch the active Lens from the View pill in the top bar.
Lenses are available on Elite+ and Auto+ plans. Free, Basic, and Pro accounts use a single (Tax) Lens — the switcher pill is hidden so the UI stays uncluttered.

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The mental model in 30 seconds

A Category is a single bucket — Groceries, Software, Office Rent. A transaction has one Category. That’s unchanged. A Lens is a selection of Categories you’ve grouped together so you can flip the whole app’s view to “just this slice.” A Lens has a name, a colour, an icon, and a list of which Categories belong to it. When a Lens is active, every page filters its data to only the transactions whose Category is in that Lens’s list. When you switch to All, no filter applies — you see everything. That’s it. There’s no second categorisation layer to maintain. No tagging needed beyond what you already do.

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Worked examples

Pick the pattern that matches your life. The Categories page ships templates for each.

Freelancer / Contractor

Problem: Your side gig income and expenses get tangled with personal spend. Tax season is a guess-and-check.Lens setup:
  • Freelance: Client Income · Software Subscriptions · Home Office · Co-working · Professional Development
  • Personal: Groceries · Rent · Utilities · Dining · Travel
  • Tax (default): everything together for the full ATO picture
Daily use: “Freelance” lens to see how much you billed this month minus business costs. “Tax” lens at end-of-FY for the full return.

Multi-property Landlord

Problem: Three rental properties. Each has its own rates bill, repairs, insurance. You need P&L per property for the tax return.Lens setup:
  • 123 Smith St: just that property’s categories
  • 45 Park Ave: that property’s categories
  • 17 Bayview Rd: that property’s categories
  • Tax: all properties + your other deductible expenses
Daily use: Switch to a single property’s Lens to scan its net yield. Switch to Tax to see the consolidated deductible picture.

Side Hustle (E-commerce)

Problem: You run a Shopify store on the side. COGS, ad spend, packaging, refunds — none of it should bleed into your day-job tax view.Lens setup:
  • E-commerce: Shopify Fees · Ads · Inventory · Packaging · Returns · Sales
  • Day Job: salary deductions, commuting, work-from-home costs
  • Tax: full unified view for the return
Daily use: E-commerce lens for store P&L. Tax lens at year-end for everything in one place.

Family Budget Split

Problem: Joint account. You want to see your spending and your partner’s spending separately without splitting accounts.Lens setup:
  • Mine: categories you mostly spend in
  • Theirs: categories they mostly spend in
  • Shared: groceries, mortgage, utilities, kids
  • Tax: the full household for joint return
Daily use: Quick weekly check on each person’s discretionary spend. Tax lens for the year.

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What changes when you switch a Lens

The same data, re-pivoted across the whole app. None of these require a refresh — switching the View pill triggers the re-fetch automatically.

Insight+

Cash flow, trends, budget-vs-actual all narrow to the Lens’s categories. Charts re-pivot in place.

Expenses

KPI cards (Total / Tax Deductible / Deductible Rate), the bar chart, the 3D category chart, and the transaction list all re-filter together.

Bills

Recurring patterns narrow to those whose category is in the active Lens. Counts and totals re-compute.

Allocations

Budget rows narrow to the Lens’s categories. Set a “Freelance” Lens and your budget header is just the freelance limits.

Travel Expenses

Trip records filter by their assigned category. Untagged trips drop out — set them up via the trip edit dialog.

All Transactions

The list re-fetches with the Lens’s category filter intersected against any column filters you’ve set. Pagination + sort preserved.

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What Lenses do NOT do

Set the expectation so the abstraction stays trustworthy:
  • Lenses don’t move money. Switching from Tax to Freelance doesn’t change a single transaction’s category, amount, or date.
  • Lenses don’t affect tax reports filed. The ATO myDeductions export is always pulled from the Tax Lens (your authoritative compliance view) regardless of which Lens you’re currently viewing.
  • Lenses don’t change bank-feed buckets. The Bank Transactions page (raw imports / CSV uploads) is bucket-driven, not category-driven, and ignores the Lens pill.
  • Lenses don’t replace Categories. A Category is still the unit a transaction is tagged with. A Lens is a grouping of Categories you can switch between.
  • Lenses don’t tag automatically. A transaction shows up in a Lens because its Category is part of that Lens. To make a transaction appear in a different Lens, change its Category (one click in any transaction list).

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How to use it

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Create your first custom Lens

1

Open Categories

From the sidebar, Personalize → Categories. You’ll land on the Categories tab by default.
2

Switch to the Lenses tab

Click the Lenses tab at the top. You’ll see your existing default Lens (usually called General or Tax) plus a list of tabs for each active Lens.
3

Click 'Add Lens' or pick a template

Either start from scratch with + Create Lens or pick a template (Freelancer, Multi-property, E-commerce, etc.) that ships with sensible default categories you can edit.
4

Add categories to the Lens

Pick which Categories belong in this Lens. A Category can belong to more than one Lens (Groceries can sit in both Personal and Tax, for example) — there’s no exclusivity rule.
5

Save and switch

Hit Save. The new Lens appears in the top-bar View dropdown immediately. Click it to make it your active view.

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Switch between Lenses

The View pill

The pill in the top-right of the AppBar (between the date filter and your avatar) is the switcher. It shows whichever Lens is currently active. Click it to open the dropdown.
The dropdown shows:
  • All — special “no filter” view (everything across all Lenses)
  • Your active Lenses, sorted with current first, primary second, then alphabetical
  • A Default chip on your primary Lens (the one that loads on first sign-in each day)
  • An Empty chip on any Lens that has zero Categories — disabled with a one-click “Add categories” link to fix it
Each Lens row shows its Category count, so you can tell at a glance how broad each view is.

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Set your primary (default) Lens

Your primary Lens is what loads when you first sign in or open a new tab. To change it:
1

Open the Lens you want as primary

Go to Categories → Lenses → [your Lens] tab.
2

Mark it as primary

Use the Make Primary action on the Lens management card. The “Default” chip will move to your new primary.

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”Untagged” categories

When you’re on the Lenses tab, you’ll see an Untagged subtab that collects Categories that aren’t part of any Lens. These never show up when a specific Lens is active (they have no Lens to be filtered into) — but they DO appear under All mode. Use the Untagged subtab as your sorting hospital — drag categories from there into the Lens that suits them, and they’ll start appearing in that Lens’s filtered views.

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Real-world tips

Don’t try to design five Lenses up-front. The default Tax Lens covers almost every user. Add a second one only when you find yourself wishing you could “see just my X without my Y” — that wish is your signal to make a new Lens.
Groceries can sit in Personal AND Tax AND Family Budget. There’s no exclusivity rule. Lenses are a viewing index, not a folder hierarchy.
If you switch to a Lens and the numbers look low, swap to All for a sanity check. Discrepancies usually mean you have transactions in Categories that aren’t yet in your Lens — easy fix in the Categories tab.
Good: Freelance, Tax, Project ClientX, Personal. Awkward: Q3 2026 expenses, Things to deduct. Lenses are perspectives — name them like roles you wear, not like reports you’d export.
A Lens with zero Categories is treated as “no filter” (same as All) so you never see a blank-page dead-end. The dropdown disables empty user-created Lenses and offers an “Add categories” link to fix them.

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Troubleshooting

Check two things:
  1. Does the Lens you switched to actually have different Categories from the previous one? If both Lenses contain the same Categories, you’ll see the same data — that’s correct behaviour. The Categories page → Lenses tab shows you exactly which Categories are in each.
  2. Are you on a page that’s Lens-aware? Lenses filter Insight+, Expenses, Bills, Allocations, Travel, All Transactions, and the Categories page itself. Settings, Tax Export, Bank Transactions, and marketing pages ignore the Lens pill on purpose.
The pill only shows on Lens-aware pages (see the list above). On pages where Lenses have no effect, the pill is hidden so it never invites a no-op click.If you’re on a Lens-aware page and still don’t see it: your plan tier might not include Lenses (Free / Basic / Pro). Upgrade to Elite+ or Auto+ to unlock the switcher.On mobile / narrow viewports, the pill shrinks to a circular icon button (matching the date filter chrome). Same dropdown, smaller trigger.
That Lens has zero Categories. Selecting it would no-op (showing all transactions, same as All), so we disable it and show an inline Add categories link. Click that link to jump to the Categories page and populate the Lens.
Inactive Lenses are hidden from the switcher dropdown (they’d be unselectable anyway). To bring one back, open Categories → Lenses tab and toggle it back to active. The footer of the switcher dropdown shows “N inactive sets hidden” as a reminder, with a one-click “Manage views →” link.
Trips and bills are filtered by their assigned Category. When you create a new one while a non-default Lens is active, the dialog pre-selects that Lens’s first Category — but you can pick any Category. If your trip / bill is assigned to a Category that isn’t in the current Lens, it won’t appear. Switch to All to confirm it exists, then re-categorise if needed.

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How Lenses fit with the rest of the app

Categories

Categories are the unit of tagging. Lenses are groupings of Categories. You manage both on the Categories page.

Custom Rules

Rules categorise incoming transactions automatically. Once tagged, those transactions flow into whichever Lenses contain their Category — no separate Lens routing needed.

Allocations

Set budget limits per Category. With a Lens active, the Allocations page shows only the limits relevant to that perspective — your “Freelance” budget separates cleanly from the household one.

Insight+

Cash flow, trends, and budget-vs-actual charts pivot live with the active Lens. The Lens becomes a second axis on top of the date filter.
Ready to set up your first Lens? Open the Categories page, click the Lenses tab, and pick a template — Freelancer, Multi-property, or E-commerce. Or start blank and define your own. Related features:
  • Categories — the unit of tagging that Lenses group together
  • Custom Rules — automated categorisation that feeds your Lenses
  • Insight+ — charts and trends that pivot per Lens
  • Allocations — per-Lens budgets
Lenses — categorise once, view your money any way you need.