Insights & Reports
The longer view: where the money actually went, and what Cadence noticed about it.
Updated
Insight Cards
Cadence generates insights from your data and surfaces them on your dashboard. They come in several kinds:
| Kind | Tells you |
|---|---|
| Alerts | Something that needs attention, like overspending or unusual activity |
| Achievements | A milestone reached: a goal hit, a month under budget |
| Recommendations | A change worth considering, based on your patterns |
| Optimizations | A way to save money or allocate a budget more effectively |
You will also see forecasts, comparisons and milestone insights as Cadence spots them. Each card may carry an action you can take directly from it. Dismiss the ones you have reviewed to keep the feed focused.
Which kinds you get, and how they are written, is under Settings → Insights. The switch that hides insight cards app-wide is under Appearance, which is where people tend not to look for it.
Suggestions
Separately from insights, Cadence detects patterns in your spending and suggests recurring bills or budget adjustments. Accept one to apply it, or dismiss it if it does not fit.
Tip
Suggestions get better with history, so an account a few months old produces more useful ones than a fresh one. Reviewing them monthly is the fastest way to catch a subscription you forgot about.
The Budget Report
The Budget tab of Reports holds:
- Charts of your spending trends over time.
- Performance cards for each budget.
- An Activity Breakdown chart of where money went.
- A Bill Spending summary of what your bills actually cost during the period. It looks backwards at what was paid; for what is coming, see Cash Flow.
- A full transaction list for the period, with its own search, filters and a sort control.
The budget-performance sections need budgets to report on, so they do not appear while WorryFree is switched on.
The Activity Breakdown Chart
Activity Breakdown shows where a period’s income ended up. It has two views, Bar and Sankey, drawing on the same numbers.
Bar lists your outflows largest first, so a $2,000 investment contribution sits alongside a $2,000 rent payment rather than in its own block. Sankey draws the flow: income sources on the left, then a split into Needs, Wants and Savings, then individual categories.
Savings and Investments are not the same row
Investments is real spending you categorised as such - a TFSA, RRSP or brokerage contribution. Savings is what is left after everything else: income minus spending minus what you invested. So Savings is not a category you can tap into, it is the remainder, and the two always add up to your surplus for the period.
Investment contributions are counted once, as a destination for your money, never as spending. Transfers between your own accounts are left out of savings entirely - counting them would double up every credit card payment and make your savings rate look roughly twice what it is.
The Net Worth Report
The Net Worth tab charts your net worth over time. It opens on a single overall line; switch to a category breakdown to see how Cash, Investments, Retirement and the rest contribute, with sparkline cards below summarising each.
If you hold investments, a Holdings card further down plots two lines over the same period: what your holdings are worth, and what you paid for them. The gap between them is your gain or loss. The figure in the card’s header is the change across the period you are viewing, not since you bought in, and it follows the date range you pick for the tab.
Where Goals Went
Goals have their own top-level section rather than a Reports tab, so Reports has exactly two tabs: Budget and Net Worth. See Goals.