Think about how money actually moves through your household. Salaries arrive in personal accounts. Some moves to the joint account for shared bills. The mortgage comes out on the 1st. Groceries might come from either account depending on who's at the shop. You transfer your half of the council tax. Your partner covers the streaming subscriptions.
This is normal. This is how households work. And yet most of the time, when you try to get a clear picture of your finances, this everyday complexity turns into noise.
The joint account dance
If you and your partner both have personal accounts and a joint account, you're probably making regular transfers. £800 from each of you into the joint account every month. That's £1,600 that moved between your own accounts — it's not spending, and it's not income. It's just your household's plumbing.
But in most financial views, those transfers inflate your numbers. Your spending looks £800 higher than it really is. Your partner's "income" includes money that was already yours as a household. The picture becomes meaningless because it doesn't understand the household boundary.
Money has directions
Once you see your household as a whole, something clicks. Money flows in patterns — predictable, repeating, telling. Salaries in. Joint contributions across. Bills out. Savings aside. These flows are the skeleton of your financial life.
They're more revealing than any individual transaction. They tell you how your household actually works, month after month, season after season. And they're the thing that becomes invisible when you're looking at one account at a time.
How Keep sees your household
Keep is built to understand that money moves between accounts that all belong to the same household. When you transfer £800 to the joint account, Keep sees it for what it is: an internal movement, not spending.
This means your totals actually mean something. Spending is genuinely what left your household. Income is genuinely what arrived. And the picture you see reflects your life, not an accounting artefact.
Shared without surveillance
There's a tension in household finance between shared visibility and personal privacy. Some couples want to see everything together. Others want shared bills tracked jointly but personal spending kept personal. Both are valid.
Keep respects this. You decide which accounts to include and at what level of detail. The goal is a useful shared picture — not surveillance of your partner's spending. Trust is built through transparency that you choose, not transparency that's imposed.
Why this matters
Money is one of the biggest sources of tension in relationships. Not because people are bad with money, but because they can't see the same picture. When both people in a household have a clear, shared understanding of where money flows, conversations about finances become calmer, more productive, and less likely to turn into arguments.
That's what we're building toward. Not two separate views — but one shared understanding.