Key concepts
A short primer on the vocabulary the app uses. None of this is surprising if you have ever written your net worth on the back of a napkin — but the terms show up often enough that it is worth naming them once.
Net worth
Net worth = total assets − total liabilities, all expressed in your default currency. This single number lives at the top of the Summary page and is what the main chart plots over time.
Assets
Anything you own that has monetary value: cash in a bank, stocks, crypto, real estate, a car, a loan you made to a friend. Every asset in Finance Hero uses one of three tracking models depending on how you want to record its value.
Tracking models
| Model | Use when | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Value-based | You want to record a single purchase price and a single current value, and compare them | An apartment you bought for 500k and is now worth 700k |
| Unit-based | The asset is divisible, tradeable, and best described as quantity × price per unit | 100 AAPL shares at $150 each |
| Balance-based | Purchase price is irrelevant — only the current balance matters | A checking account with $5,000 in it |
You pick the tracking model when you create the asset. It cannot be changed later — if you get it wrong, delete and recreate.
Liabilities
Anything you owe: mortgages, loans, credit-card balances, or a generic "other". Liabilities have a type (Loan / Mortgage / Credit Card / Other) and a status (Active / Potential / Paid Off).
- Active — current ongoing debt. Counts against net worth.
- Potential — debt you expect but do not yet have (e.g. a loan approved but not drawn). Tracked for planning; does not yet count against net worth.
- Paid Off — archived. Kept for history, excluded from current totals.
Asset-linked liabilities
Some debts exist because of a specific asset — a mortgage exists because a house exists. Finance Hero detects these cases and separates standalone liabilities (a personal loan you took out for cash) from asset-linked liabilities (the mortgage against your house) on the dashboard. This makes it easy to see true equity, for example "house worth 700k, mortgage 400k, equity 300k".
Categories and groups
- Categories are your top-level labels: Stocks, Real estate, Cash accounts, Mortgages, Credit cards. Every asset, liability, and transaction belongs to one category (or is explicitly uncategorised).
- Groups are an optional second level above categories — useful when you have lots of categories. You might put Stocks / Crypto / ETFs into a single Investments group so they stack together on charts.
Asset categories, liability categories, and transaction categories are three separate taxonomies. A category you create for assets will not show up in the liabilities or transactions pickers.
Historical entries
Value-based and balance-based assets (and all liabilities) support a timeline of snapshots. Every time you update the current value, the previous value stays in the history — so you can look at a chart of "how did this position move over 2025" rather than just "what is it worth today".
For unit-based assets the history is implicit: it is the record of every buy/sell transaction you entered.
Currencies
Each asset and each liability is stored in its own currency. Your default display currency (set in Settings) is what the app uses to show totals and the net worth chart. Finance Hero fetches live exchange rates and converts on display — your underlying records are never rewritten.
Transactions (two different things)
The word "transaction" means two different things in Finance Hero. Keep them straight:
| Term | Where | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Asset transaction | Inside a unit-based asset | A buy or sell that changes quantity held |
| Income/expense transaction | The Transactions page | A cash-flow record, separate from the balance sheet |
Asset transactions affect net worth by changing what you own. Income/expense transactions affect your flow — useful for budgeting, but do not themselves move any balance on the net-worth chart.