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Cashflow

OCT’25-DEC’25

Finny Cashflow helps users understand their income, expenses, and savings surplus/deficit, forming the foundation for accurate FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) projections.

Overview

Finny Cashflow helps users understand their income, expenses, and savings surplus/deficit, forming the foundation for accurate FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) projections.

My Role

Led end-to-end design and strategy for the cashflow feature, translating user needs into a focused MVP with clearly defined functionality.

Problem

Most users lacked a clear understanding of:

  • Where their money was actually going

  • Whether they were saving enough—or leaking silently

  • How day-to-day behaviour impacted long-term FIRE outcomes

Without a reliable cashflow view:

  • FIRE projections became inaccurate

  • Users couldn’t identify what to optimise

  • Financial behaviour changes were unguided and reactive

The challenge was to make complex financial data instantly understandable—without overwhelming users.

Constraints & Complexity


  • Raw financial data was messy and inconsistent (banks, investments, transfers)

  • Users varied widely in financial literacy

  • Cashflow needed to work across individual, spouse, and family contexts

  • Insights had to be explainable, not just calculated

  • The system needed to scale as more data sources were added


Goal & Success Metrics


Primary goal:
Create a clear, trustworthy cashflow system that users could understand at a glance—and act on.


Success indicators:

  • User comprehension of surplus vs deficit

  • Reduction in confusion around spending and savings

  • Increased confidence in FIRE calculations

  • Engagement with breakdowns and trends

Key Insights

I orchestrated the entire user research process for this project, overseeing planning, recruitment, execution, and insight derivation. My objective was to delve into the goals, needs, and pain points of users as they navigate the realms of personal finance.

Totals alone don’t create understanding

Users needed structure—not just numbers.

Insights matters more than information

Seeing whether cashflow was “Excellent” or “Poor” was more actionable than exact decimals.

Users think in timeframes, not statements

Monthly, yearly, and recent views were critical for pattern recognition.

The Opportunity

“How might we create a simple and trustworthy cashflow experience that helps users understand their incoming, outgoing, surplus/deficit and improve their finances?”

The Solution

The research revealed three core user needs: structure over raw totals, actionable health signals over exact figures and timeframe-based pattern recognition.


The cashflow feature addresses these by breaking spending into categorised buckets, surfacing a simple Excellent/Reasonable/poor health indicator, and offering toggleable time views (monthly, yearly, average, total). Together, these create a weekly habit loop, users return to check their health score, drill into categories, and track progress directly driving WAU.

Clear primary signal: surplus vs deficit

The core view focused on one question:

"Is my cashflow healthy right now?"

  • Incoming vs outgoing clearly separated

  • Net surplus/deficit highlighted as the primary outcome

  • Removed secondary details from the first glance

This reduced cognitive load and anchored interpretation


Time-aware cashflow views

To support different mental models, users could switch between:

  • Monthly averages

  • Yearly averages

  • Specific months


This allowed users to identify:

  • Short-term anomalies

  • Long-term trends

  • Behavioural drift over time


Health indicators instead of raw judgement

Introduced Cashflow Health states:

  • Excellent

  • Reasonable

  • Poor

These translated complex calculations into human-readable feedback, helping users self-assess without feeling judged.

 Money Checks: explain the “why”

To prevent confusion and mistrust:

  • Added Money Checks that surfaced transfers, loans, investments, and redemptions

  • Explicitly called out self-transfers and family transactions

  • Reduced the “where did my money go?” anxiety

This layer built trust in the system’s accuracy.

Category system with drill-down depth


Designed interactive category cards:

  • Spending split by category with percentage and amount

  • Drill-down to individual transactions

  • Merchant-level visibility with dates and amounts


Added trend views:

  • Month-over-month

  • Year-over-year

  • Average benchmarks

This enabled users to move from awareness → diagnosis → action.

Systems Thinking & Scalability


The Cashflow system was designed to:


  • Support future data sources (PF, insurance, vehicles)

  • Extend across individual, spouse, and family views

  • Feed clean, explainable inputs into FIRE calculations

Scale from MVP to full advisory platform

The Impact

Users gained immediate clarity on their financial position


  • Cashflow became the most referenced screen when discussing FIRE readiness

  • Reduced confusion around savings and spending patterns

  • Strengthened trust in Finny’s advisory recommendations

Qualitative feedback highlighted:

  • “This finally makes my money make sense”

  • “I know exactly where I’m off-track now”