Your inbox

The inbox is where keel surfaces everything that needs your attention or that you should know about. It replaces scattered notifications across different screens with one organised view — think of it as a financial to-do list that keel maintains for you.

How it works

Three sections

Needs Attention (top) holds actionable items — accounts that need a fresh statement, transactions waiting for review, months ready to be confirmed. Each has a clear action, and items disappear automatically when the underlying situation is resolved (import the statement and the reminder clears itself).

Recent Updates (middle) holds informational items — things that happened but don't require action. Your score went up 12 points, a new recurring charge was detected, a month report is ready. These carry an unread dot that clears when you tap them.

History (bottom) is a 30-day record of resolved and dismissed items — compact rows showing what keel flagged and when it was handled.

How items arrive

keel checks for new items daily (accounts due an import, expected debt payments, ageing credit reports) and weekly on Mondays (spending patterns, savings rate, budget adherence, streaks, and coaching insights). There's no manual refresh button — household finance isn't a fast-moving environment, and the daily cadence covers it.

Grouping

When the same type of item applies to multiple accounts — say three accounts all need importing — they collapse into one card showing the count. Tap to expand.

Merchant hygiene reminders (worth consolidating, rule mismatch, multiple categories, worth locking in) group too: with 3 or fewer, they appear individually; with 4 or more, they collapse into a single "N merchants need a quick fix" card that opens a dedicated review screen. The aggregate counts as one card so it doesn't crowd out other things. See merchant learning for what each reminder means.

Dismiss and snooze

Every card in Needs Attention and Recent Updates has a Dismiss button, with a 5-second undo in case you slip. Dismissed items move to History.

Instead of dismissing, you can snooze a Needs Attention item for 1 week or 1 month. Snoozing is an explicit deferral, so it never triggers the come-back escalation that repeated dismissals can. Recent Updates can't be snoozed — they're about things that already happened, not ongoing tasks.

The bell icon

The dashboard shows a bell in the top-right. The badge number matches how many cards you'll see in Needs Attention (the grouped count, not the raw total). It disappears when there's nothing to action.

Import reminders

There's a single import reminder per account, and it grows in urgency rather than multiplying. When a fresh statement is expected but not yet imported, the reminder is due — a gentle nudge in Recent Updates. If it's still not imported 5 days later, it escalates to overdue and moves to Needs Attention. The moment you import, it clears.

keel works out when a statement is actually expected from each account's own rhythm — monthly by default, but accounts that statement every two months, quarterly, or annually are respected, so a quarterly savings account isn't nagged every month. If keel knows your statement day, the reminder lands a few days after it. Brand-new accounts with nothing imported yet are never marked overdue — that's just an empty account waiting for its first import.

After an import

When you import a statement, up to three things can appear:

• "Your transactions are ready" — shown to the other household member only. You just walked through the import yourself, so keel doesn't pat itself on the back to you. If you upload several files at once, this collapses into a single row ("Mike imported across 7 accounts — 300 transactions categorised"). It expires after 7 days.
• "Your import needs a review" — only appears if some transactions are still unreviewed. Its urgency fades with age: prominent for the first week, quieter in weeks 2–4, then it drops out of the default view.
• "Some transactions didn't get categorised" — if AI categorisation failed partway through. This one never expires until the work is done, because it represents a real gap that hurts coaching accuracy.

All three resolve automatically once the underlying state clears — keel cares about the outcome, not which path you took to get there.

When you graduate out of an ongoing problem

Some Needs Attention cards describe an ongoing situation rather than a one-off task — "your card balance isn't coming down", or "this account has been stuck overdrawn". These stay while the pattern holds.

When the pattern stops being true — say you start paying your card down faster than you spend on it — keel clears the card itself on the next daily check. It moves to History marked as resolved, so there's still a record, and your inbox reflects where you are now, not where you were last week. (Cards you dismissed yourself stay dismissed.)

When your partner changes a shared goal

Goals belong to the household, not to one person. When one member creates a goal, retargets it, changes its deadline, or makes it the primary goal, the other member sees an update in Recent Updates — "Victoria set a new household goal" — with a link straight to it. You never get notified about your own edits. If you both edit the same goal on the same day, the updates collapse into one entry describing the most recent change.

Good to know

• New users with no data see "All clear. keel will let you know when something needs your attention." — not an empty-feeling blank screen.
• Recent Updates caps at 20 items; History shows 30 days.
• Coaching items need history. Insights about overspending or savings rate only appear after 2+ months of transaction data.
• A dismissed item whose underlying condition is still true 7 days later will come back — persistent problems deserve persistent attention.

FAQ

Where did the coaching cards on the dashboard go? They're still there — the top items render on the dashboard as before. The inbox is the persistent home; the dashboard is the daily glance.

Can I turn off certain types of notifications? Not yet. Notification preferences will ship alongside push notifications in a future update.

Why did a dismissed item come back? If the underlying condition is still true 7 days after you dismissed it, keel re-surfaces it. Use snooze instead if you want to defer it for a set period.

I tapped through to a page from a notification — will back bring me back here? Yes. When you follow a notification into a page (a goal, a debt, an account), the back arrow returns you to the inbox. Opening that same page from the menu still sends back to its natural parent, so normal navigation is unchanged.