Quick Start
For those who just want to dive right in, here are the basic steps to get you started.
- Connect Mojito to your active Mint session. Follow the steps here. (Unfortunately, this is a somewhat "technical" step that is now required due to login changes that Mint made back in June 2016)
- Start off by doing a "Sync all" with Mint (Mojito menu > Sync all with Mint).
- This will download a couple of weeks of transactions, your account names and current balances, and your categories and tags.
- Note: If you are prompted with "Authorization required", click OK, then Accept; then select "Sync all with Mint" from the menu again.
- To import more transactions, select "Sync: Import txn data" from the Mojito menu. When the import dialog window appears, specify the date range you wish to import.
- Add and remove budgets. You can view budgets over various date ranges.
- Exclude accounts, categories, or tags to remove "noise" transactions or to make budgets more powerful (see tutorial for more on this).
- To see your transactions grouped and highlighted by budget item, just click the "Show matching txns" button on the Budget sheet.
- Look at your total inflows vs. outflows to get a sense of "how you're doing"
- Import your accounts balances periodically to track your balance history (Mojito menu > Sync: Import account balances).
- Once a week, go through your latest transactions and clear them ("c").
- This is a good practice as it encourages you to revisit your transactions on a regular basis and acknowledge that each one is valid. This not only allows you to detect fraudulent activity in your account, but it also reminds you how your are spending your money.
- At the same time you are clearing your transactions, you can correct the categories that Mint assigned and add any relevant tags.
- This entire process should be quick; no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
