Your Dashboard Now Answers One Question: How Am I Doing?

The ticket I wrote for this week starts with one blunt line: "Looking at the MFFT Dashboard, it's obsolete."

It was. The cards had made sense when MFFT was mostly a budget tracker, and none of them answered the question you actually open a finance app with: how am I doing? So you clicked to net worth, then budgeting, then the plan. Three pages to feel calm.

This week the old dashboard got deleted. Not tucked behind a setting. Deleted.

One screen, the whole picture

The new home page is a summary of everything you track, with every detail one click away.

At the top sit your net worth with how much it moved last month, and last month itself as one bar: needs, wants, what you invested, what was left over. Under both runs a line I call the road ahead. It starts at your first recorded balance, runs through today, and carries on through the things you are planning for: the first round milestone, a big trip, the kids' college, the year work becomes optional, retirement.

Below that: your year in spending, how your net worth grew year by year, a short review of the month that connects what you spent to what your net worth did, and a few small gauges. The last card is always "Next steps", and every suggestion in it can be dismissed. No guilt list.

Two rules I held the design to.

The page follows what you use. If you only track a budget, you see budget tiles. Only a portfolio, portfolio tiles. There are no empty cards with a zero and a sad icon. A brand-new account gets its own simple first page instead of a wall of zeros.

Every number is the same number as the page behind it. The net worth figure on home is the one the Net Worth page shows, computed the same way. If home and the detail page ever disagreed by a dollar, you would stop trusting both, and you would be right.

To use it: just log in, it is the first screen. Click any arrow to land on the page that number came from. Or look around the demo without an account.

The heat map I promised

Last week I said a heat map of your holdings was next. It shipped on Thursday.

On the portfolio page, the Underlying Holdings card now opens as a map. Each company you own is a tile sized by how much of your money sits in it, including what hides inside your funds, and coloured by how it did over the last 12 months. Green did well, red did not. Everything too small to get its own tile goes into one striped "Other" block, drawn at its real size, so you can see that two thirds of a typical index portfolio is hundreds of companies you will never think about individually. That is the point of an index fund, and it is nice to see it.

Portfolio, scroll to Underlying Holdings, and switch between Heatmap and List in the corner. In the demo it tells the sample family that Apple is 12.4% of everything they own. Go see what yours says. It is the most honest picture in the app.

Smaller things you will notice

• The app stopped asking about one-off payments. When you recategorise a payment, MFFT used to ask "always put this merchant here?" every single time, including for the plumber you will see once in your life. Now it only asks when the merchant shows up again in your payments.
• The budget year chart shows what was left over. Under each month there is now a small strip: what came in minus what you spent and invested. Above the line, money left. Below it, a short month. Hover a month for the full breakdown, with needs and wants each checked against their own budget.
• Your salary is no longer a "one-off". The income plan was offering to expect a regular salary "again next year" as if it were a bonus. Fixed.
• Two Polish pension funds. Someone in Poland asked for the two NN pension funds they hold. Both are priced now.

What I am working on next

Living off your investments: which holdings to sell and when, once the paycheck stops. Then I want to sit down with real broker statement files and go through portfolio imports again end to end, because "it worked on my file" is not a test.

The lesson this week came out of building home. Its "payments to sort" card opens your transaction list, and for anyone in the Americas that list could open without the very payments the card had just counted. A payment made on the 1st was being read as midnight in London, which in California is still the evening before, so it slid into the previous month. Anywhere east of London you would never see it, and that includes me. A date on a payment is a day on a calendar, not a moment in time, and the app now treats it that way everywhere.

Open the app and tell me what the first screen says about you. I hope it is good news.