Guide 01

Getting started

What Garden is

Garden is a personal finance application that runs on your own machine. It does three things:

statements or type them in; Garden categorises, finds recurring charges, and shows you where the money went.

a net-worth statement, a proof-of-income letter, a packet for a rental application, a summary for your tax preparer, and federal forms including SBA Form 413, Schedule C and W-9.

your own ledger triggers it, not as a library you are expected to browse.

1. Keeps your ledger — accounts, transactions, budgets, goals. You import
2. Produces the documents people ask you for — a profit and loss statement,
3. Explains what it is doing — the Learn section surfaces a concept when

The second one is the reason Garden exists. Plenty of software will budget for you. Very little of it will hand you the document a lender just asked for.

What Garden is not

It is not tax preparation, not an e-filing service, and not a substitute for a CPA or an attorney. See the financial disclaimer.

Installing

Web — open Garden in a browser and it runs. Your data is stored locally in the browser, on your machine. Nothing is uploaded.

Desktop (macOS) — download the application and drag it to Applications.

iPhone — in progress. The site will say so when it is real.

Your first twenty minutes

current balance.

from your bank and drop it in. Garden reads the columns, works out which is the date and which is the amount, and shows you what it found before anything is saved. See importing.

it offers to remember that merchant. It gets quiet quickly.

statement and the net-worth statement will produce something real.

1. Add an account. A checking account is the usual starting point. Enter its
2. Import a statement. Export a CSV, OFX/QFX, QIF, XLSX, or CAMT.053 file
3. Review the categories. Garden guesses; you correct. When you correct one,
4. Look at Documents. Even with one month of data, the profit and loss

Coming from another app

If you already use YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, Mint, Actual, Lunch Money or Tiller, do not start from a blank ledger. Garden imports each of those directly, including your categories and accounts, not just the transaction rows. See moving from another app.

Your data

Your ledger stays on your device. There is no account, no sign-in, and no server holding it. If you connect a bank, set a passphrase and unlock or create an encrypted vault first: Garden refuses to start either bank connection before the vault key exists, before any network call.

Garden offers two paths. SimpleFIN is the recommended one: you buy and control your own bridge directly from SimpleFIN ($1.50/month or $15/year, paid to them, not to Garden) and paste a setup token into Garden, which exchanges it for an access URL. That URL is the credential and lives in your encrypted vault; every request to your bridge — claiming the token, the first import, and each later refresh — goes through the relay Garden operates in its Worker, which does not store or log it. Garden carries no per-connection bill for it, which is why it is recommended; that is not the same as it being free to you. Plaid is brokered through the same relay.

You can export everything at any time, in an open format. The privacy policy has the full detail and says which build gate enforces each claim.