Managing your finances

Every card here is edited on its own, with its own pencil icon and its own save, whether that is income or deposit or bills or commitments or your ideal leftover. Change something and the card shows it has unsaved work in it, then save and a brief confirmation appears before it settles back down. Nothing saves automatically, and nothing you have not touched gets resubmitted just because you saved something else nearby.

Try to leave the page (or close the tab) with unsaved changes anywhere, and you will be stopped and asked to save or discard first, listed out by exactly which sections changed, so you are never left wondering what you are about to lose.

Annual salary and monthly take-home pay, edited separately. Monthly take-home is the figure that actually feeds your affordability score, annual salary is currently just stored for future use.

If you have a linked partner, your bill split percentage lives here too, with its own separate save, changing your income does not accidentally change your split, or the other way round.

A list of deposit sources rather than one lump figure, each carrying its own type and amount plus an optional note. The types on offer are savings, gift, investments, property sale, inheritance and other. Add as many as you like and they are totalled automatically. Leaving a source’s amount blank simply drops it when you save rather than blocking the rest of the list.

Do not go hunting for a specific product in that list. A Lifetime ISA and a Help to Buy ISA and an ordinary savings account are all just savings as far as your deposit is concerned, so pick savings and use the note to say which one it is. The note is there precisely so you can be as specific as you like without the type list trying to cover every product on the market. What the app cares about is the total, and only the total feeds your score.

Your default estimates for gas and electricity, water, broadband, and groceries, plus your default mortgage rate and term. These apply to every property unless a specific one has its own override, so updating a default here is the fastest way to keep every property’s cost breakdown current at once, rather than editing them one at a time.

It is worth being clear about what these figures are. They are your predictions, not readings taken from anywhere. Nobody can tell you what a particular house will cost to heat before you have lived in it through a winter, and that includes us, since too much of it comes down to the building itself, the tariff you end up on and how warm you like your rooms. The app takes the number you give it at face value and does the arithmetic from there.

Which is why they are best set high. A useful way to think about each one is the worst case you would still be prepared to pay, rather than the figure you are hoping for. Because a default applies to every property at once, an optimistic one does not just flatter one house, it flatters all of them, and it does so quietly. Better to be pleasantly surprised by a real bill than caught out by one.

The per-property overridesare then there to work downwards from that ceiling as you learn something specific about a house. If your gas and electricity default is a deliberately gloomy £250 and a property turns out to have an EPC rating of A, you might reasonably drop it to £175 for that one, while every other property you are comparing stays measured against the cautious figure.

Your own regular outgoings outside of housing, a list of name-and-amount pairs, added and removed freely. Fill in an amount without a name and you will be asked to name it before saving, an amount with no label attached is not much use to you later. Leave both blank and the row is simply dropped.

A single percentage, the target every affordability score is measured against, covered in full on its own page. Small enough to feel like an afterthought, it is actually the single most influential number in your whole profile.