Kinly is a household-finance OS built for Canadian couples. It tracks every dollar you spend, reconciles your bank and credit-card statements automatically, and emails you a one-paragraph brief each morning telling you exactly where you stand. This guide takes you through your first five minutes.
1. Sign up with magic link
Visit kinly.ca/sign-in and enter your email. We don’t ask for a password — Kinly uses magic links instead. Check your inbox (and spam folder, if you don’t see it within a minute) for a one-tap sign-in link. The link is valid for 10 minutes.
2. Create your household
First time signing in, you’ll land on a short onboarding flow. Pick a household name (your last name works fine), choose your province, and confirm CAD as your base currency. This creates a Household with you as the owner.
Behind the scenes Kinly also generates a unique encryption key for your household, wrapped by AWS KMS in ca-central-1. From this point on, sensitive data is encrypted at rest under a key only AWS knows.
3. Invite your spouse (optional, but recommended)
From your dashboard, click Invite your spouseand enter their email. They’ll receive a magic-link invite valid for 7 days. When they accept, they join your household as the second member. Your household supports two members.
See: How to invite your spouse to your household.
4. Add your first accounts
Navigate to Accounts → Add accountand create the bank or credit-card accounts you’ll be tracking. For each one, choose the type (chequing, savings, credit card, TFSA, RRSP, FHSA, Spousal RRSP, RESP, or non-registered), the owner (you, your spouse, or joint), and optionally a nickname and the last 4 digits of the card.
You don’t need to connect to your bank in this Phase — Kinly works with manually-uploaded statements and email forwarding right now. Open-banking via Flinks is on the roadmap.
5. Record your first transaction
Three ways:
- Manual: Transactions → New transaction to type one in.
- Statement upload: Upload your latest credit-card or bank statement PDF, and Kinly parses every line for you. See How to upload a credit-card statement.
- Email integrations: Connect Gmail or forward a receipt to your private Kinly inbox alias. See Connect Gmail and Forward bills and receipts.
6. Set your first budget
Go to Budgets → New budget. Pick a category (Groceries is a good first one), set a monthly amount, and set a soft-alert threshold (we default to 80%). Kinly will email you when you’re approaching it, and again if you cross 100% — both you and your spouse on a shared budget.
What happens next
Within 24 hours of signing in, the daily-advisor cron will fire at 7 AM your local time and email you a brief covering yesterday’s activity, where you stand against your budgets, and any specific action worth taking today. That’s the core Kinly experience — the brief plus the chat at kinly.ca/chat.
Need help?
Email hello@kinlyhq.comand we’ll respond within a day. We’re a small team using Kinly ourselves every day.