In this product demo, the presenter walks through HomeZada’s Home Finances app, focusing on the newly launched household expense features. The demo begins with the Budgets tab, where HomeZada automatically generates a budget based on a home’s size and location and includes rental income tracking. The Payments tab shows how users can manually enter expenses, view budget versus actual visualizations, drill down into individual expense details (e.g., electric bills), and generate reports such as monthly budget vs. payments and multi‑year cost‑to‑own trends. The presenter then demonstrates two ways to bring transaction data into HomeZada: (1) importing CSV files, aligning fields, and using vendor‑matching rules to auto‑assign transactions to expenses; and (2) connecting directly to banks via Plaid, which automates the sync of transaction data and allows users to create persistent matching rules. Throughout, the demo emphasizes how these tools give homeowners clear visibility into the total cost of ownership, help identify cost‑saving opportunities, and support smarter financial decisions about their largest asset.
Chapters
HomeZada has a fantastic Home Finances app that allows you to consolidate and track all the financial information about your home in one place. Over on the right-hand side, you can see a scorecard here where we'll constantly update you on the estimated value of your home, calculate your loan balance, and even show you how much equity you have. But for this demo, I want to focus in on the household expenses, which is a new set of features that were recently launched. So on this first tab here called Budgets, If I scroll down the page, you can see that Homes Auto, when you sign up, is going to automatically going to create all the typical things that are expenses to manage your home. And we're even going to create a budget based on the size of your home and the location of your home. So this is all automatically entered in for you, trying to create a simple budget for you. And down at the bottom, we know that certain homeowners have rent where this could be a full-blown rental property, or it may be even partial rent that you may be getting from renting out a room for part of the year, which allows you to essentially track not only the income but the actual expenses for your home. Now the new features here is I can now click on the second tab called Payments, and this is going to track all the actual expenses that you've had for your home. Over on the top right-hand side, you can see there's a little drop arrow where it says we're currently in 2022, and you can see in the chart we have 3 months of actual data here. But the benefit of using HomeZada is I can always go back and toggle and look at previous years. So as long as you're using this to track all the data about your home, you can always go back and look at what you spent managing your home in previous years. So in 2021, you spent $44,000 managing, owning your home, and this particular property generated $15,000 in rental income. So if I scroll down the page now, you're going to see the numbers are slightly different because these are the actual payments. The beauty of this is I can now drill down into any of these things, for instance, like the electric bill. And you can now see that here are all the details of all my electric bills for 2021. So one way of doing this is data entry, where every time you go to an expense, a user could actually come in here and enter in a date, put in some notes, put in the amount, and then hit this little plus sign, which is going to save that. It's kind of what I call manual data entry. But later on in the demo, we're going to show you how you can automate that process by connecting to your online bank. But from a reporting perspective, you can also now click on the budget, and for every single expense in your house, you now get this visualization where the light purple bars is your budget, which was automatically established for you, where it was about $275 a month. And you can see that even— you can even edit it by entering in the name of the company, Duke Energy in this particular case, and that's going to be an important part to help automate the importing process. But now the dark purple lines are showing you your actual expenses. So as I'd like to say, many of your expenses are variable based on usage, and your electric bill is definitely one of them. Because it may go up in the colder months when you're heating your home, and it definitely may go up in the summer months when you're cooling your home. And now you get this instant visualization on an annual basis over how your energy bills are going up and down based on usage. Now you can also click on the Reports menu in the top right and even get more data. I'm going to go click on the left-hand side here and click on Expense Budget versus Payments. And again, I'm in currently in a partial year of 2022, so I'm going to toggle back to a previous year where I get a full year's worth of data of 2021, where I'm now actually comparing my total expenses by month against the actuals. So you can see here in the table It's showing you every month in the year. The second column shows you your budget. The third column shows you what your actual payments were. The next column, if it's red, says you spent more than your budget that particular month. If it's black, you spent less. And then the last 3 columns are basically the running total, which again shows that you spent $44,000 in 2021 owning your home. But an even better report is this multi-year payment trend report. Which is if you're using HomeZada and tracking these, you can now get views over the cost to own your home over multiple years, right? So in 2020, it cost you $42,000, and in 2019 it cost you $41,000. The really great thing here is you can actually drill down and focus in on multi-year trends across any one of your expenses. So if you click on mortgage, you can see with this example is I spent the same amount all 3 years because I was basically just paying my typical monthly mortgage payment where maybe some people may have wanted to do a lump sum payment. If you did that, you would see that here. But then there are other expenses like, for instance, your insurance costs, right? So now you can look at this chart and you can see that in 2021 it was $1,500 and 2022 was $1,300 and 3 years ago was $1,180, which now gives you that multi-year trend that your home insurance bill keeps going up. This gives you that instant financial visibility to say, hey, maybe should I shop for another home insurance provider? Or should I stay with the one that I currently have? But seeing that data definitely helps you become a better, smarter homeowner. But you can do this with all of your expenses. Let's say property tax. As we know, many counties across the country are constantly increasing the assessed value of your home. So now you can see your property tax in terms of how it's maybe going up or down. And if I go back to my electric example, right, We knew that we spent like $4,000 in, in last year on the electrical expenses. Previous year you spent a little bit less, and 2, 3 years ago you spent even less. Again, this gives you the ability to understand how can I lower my expenses. It could be by changing behavior, switching lights on and off, setting your thermostat lower, giving you visibility over how to sort of manage the different aspects of all of your expenses all in one place. Now let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the different ways of how you can actually automate those financial entries, right? So if I go back to the household expense page and click on now the 3rd tab called Bank Connections, right? Previously we saw how you could just do data entry, but now that's a more simple way is for you to basically come into this page and create— add a bank account. And we know that certain customers may pay for their home expenses out of different expense accounts. So it could be a credit card, a Venmo account, checking account, etc. And you can go to each one of those online accounts yourself and essentially export the data about all the transactions for that particular account. Then you can come to HomeZada and click on this Import CSV. And we're going to basically go hit Upload. And I've already done this with my sample account. Where I've got my second quarter expenses that I've exported out of my Wells Fargo account. And now it's showing you kind of what I call aligning the fields, right? So there's 3 important fields where you want to align the payment date with the, with the payment date. So this is kind of giving you a preview. You want to align the amount field with the amount. Sometimes your bank may have additional fields, so you want to be able to use the Ignore button and then obviously get the description. And then when you hit Continue, it's basically going to import that CSV file into the 4th tab, which is the Transactions. So this shows you all your expenses that you've paid out of your Wells Fargo checking account. Now, a few couple of things here, right? You can see that certain lines are automatically filled in green because on the 2nd to last column here where it says Expenses, I'm actually aligning this particular transaction from my checking account to which expense in Holmes Auto I want to match it to. So the lines that are already green are already pre-matched. And the way we did this is because, remember on that electric bill, we entered in Duke Energy as the vendor. So the system automatically knew that your bank saw Duke Energy in your online bill pay and then basically aligned it to your electrical bill— electrical expense, sorry. Now you can, for the unknowns, you can do a simple matching process, right? So you can click on Unknown and you say, oh, I've got my second, you know, home equity loan with US Bank. Now an important aspect over setting up rules so that every time you import this in the future is you want to create a generic set of text. So this has to do with a little bit of trying to understand how your bank sort of creates a description, but I just want to use the US Bank text because I don't want to care about the date and my account number, and I want to use that as the rule over when I import this again, I don't have to do this over and over again. Now I can come and do this for like Nationwide, which is my insurance company, right? Same sort of thing. I want to be able to edit this rule, and I wanted to sort of delete out all the specifics to that transaction and add a new rule. And you basically do this for, you know, all the different expenses. And all you have to do then is when you've aligned all the items in green, you just hit Accept All Matched, and it's automatically going to deploy those to each individual expense so you can now report on them. Sometimes you may end up with transactions from your bank that you don't want to save that aren't home-related. This allows you to easily come up here and hit Delete All, and it's just going to delete all of these transactions because they're not related to your home and you don't want to actually save them inside of HomeZada. So let's talk about one last thing, which is an automated way where we can actually connect to your individual bank. And so with that, I'm going to go to a different sample house that I've set up and click on Finances and go to Household Expenses and go to Bank Connections. So now if I go to the upper right-hand corner and hit Add Bank Account, when you create a new one, we have an automated way to actually connect directly to your bank. So all you do is hit Yes. We use a technology provider called Plaid, where now we're basically doing the initial setup. And basically, Plaid gives us access to virtually every bank across the United States. So at this point in time, all you would do is basically search for whichever bank you bank with, select that particular bank, and then it's going to walk you through a process to essentially create what I call the setup, where you're going to log in with your username and password. It's going to support multifactor authentication. Maybe you have a text code, and it's basically doing doing that one-time setup where HomeZada is doing this very securely, where all we're doing is actually reading that data once we've done that initial setup. So I'm just going to exit out of here to show you that initial setup, but I've already done this with my sample Wells Fargo checking account where now instead of hitting Import CSV, all I have to do is hit the word Sync, right? And now I can pick again a date range over how much data do I want to sync back We'll go back to the beginning of the year of January for this and hit Sync. And so this is essentially automating that process where you don't have to go to your online bank, do the export to the CSV file, and then come and do an import. It's automatically doing that all for you. So once the sync is done, the Transactions tab shows you all of the transactions that it's got from your online bank. Again, you can now go through the process of the items that are in green are already matched. And really, you want to go on the far right-hand side and pick the expense. For instance, this is my electric bill, so I'm going to come down here and choose the electric expense. Again, I want to edit this because I don't want all of the unique aspects of this specific transaction that I did on January 4th. I want to eliminate all that. I just want to create a rule that says when you find PG&E, use that to do a match, right? Comcast is my internet service provider, right? So I want to come over here and click Internet, right? Again, lots of different ways to essentially create all that and then come in here and say accept all matched. And once you do this once or twice, it becomes very easy to essentially match all of your different expenses. So in conclusion, hopefully you see how easy it is to consolidate all the financial information to really truly know the total cost of ownership of your home. At the budget level, tracking all of your payments from a historical perspective, tracking the different places that you pay for your expenses by connecting to different connect— bank connections and bringing all those transactions in either an automated way or doing it through an import or through a connect— connection directly to your bank. So we certainly want to make you a better, smarter homeowner, and we think this is really going to help you manage your largest financial asset. Thanks.
