ArgusPrivate household finance
The household books and the flying business, in one ledger.
Argus reads your banks through Plaid and your companies through QuickBooks, then keeps groceries and jet fuel in the same set of books — separated exactly where a tax return needs them separated. Each household has its own private books, shared only with the people it invites.
There is no public sign-up and nothing to buy. Argus is by invitation only: an account is created only through an invitation link.
There are two Arguses. The giant who never slept, and Odysseus's dog, who waited twenty years and knew him when nobody else did.
How it works
A transaction gets filed once, by you, and then never again.
Most of the work in a finance app is categorizing the same merchant for the rest of your life. Argus is built to make that a one-time cost.
- 01
Connect
Link a bank, card or brokerage through Plaid. Balances and transaction history arrive on the first sync, and new charges arrive as they clear.
- 02
File
Every transaction lands in a category, chosen from your rules first, your own filing history second and the provider's classification last.
- 03
Review
A category that was a guess is queued instead of filed quietly. Review holds only those, with the merchant identified and your past choices next to it.
- 04
Settle it once
Choose a category and keep it for the merchant. Argus writes a rule, files that merchant the same way from then on, and never asks again.
Business and household
Contract income does not fit a personal-finance app.
Pay arrives per trip and per invoice, several entities file separately, and half the charges on a card are deductible. Argus treats that as the normal case rather than an edge case.
One card, one company
Register each LLC, then assign the cards that belong to it. Charges inherit the company's tax treatment instead of being sorted out by hand in April.
Billed, and actually banked
QuickBooks receivables sit beside real balances, so you can see what has been invoiced but not paid. It stays out of income until the deposit lands.
A year your CPA can open
Export any tax year as an itemized or summary CSV, split into business, personal-deductible and personal, with every cell quoted properly.
The arithmetic
Six ways a finance app quietly reports the wrong number.
Each of these produces a plausible figure that is wrong, which is worse than an obvious error. Argus handles them deliberately, and each one has a check script behind it.
- Debt is subtracted, not summed
- Plaid reports a card or loan balance as a positive amount owed. Adding it in with your assets inflates net worth by twice the debt.
- A refund is not income
- An airline refund is netted against the ticket it reverses. Counted as income instead, it would read as a good month and leave the ticket inflating Travel.
- A card payment is not spending
- Money moving between your own accounts is a transfer. Counting it would double every purchase the payment settles.
- An invoice is not income
- Realized income comes from the bank feed alone. An open invoice shows what is expected and never props up a month it has not funded.
- A correction survives the next sync
- Categories are written when a transaction first arrives. Re-syncing an account never overwrites something you filed by hand.
- A lookup suggests, it never files
- Argus can look up an unfamiliar merchant to say what the business actually is. The answer is offered beside your own history, never applied on its own.
The screens
Fourteen views over the same set of books.
Overview
Net worth, the month so far and what just cleared.
Accounts
Every balance by type, assets and liabilities kept apart.
Transactions
Search, filter and recategorize without leaving the row.
Review
Only the charges Argus was not sure how to file.
Rules
Merchants filed automatically, and the ones worth a rule.
Budget
An amount per category each month, actuals filled in for you.
Cash flow
Income against expenses, and where the money went.
Recurring
Scheduled charges found in your own history, and what is late.
Investments
Holdings, market value and gain where cost basis is reported.
Goals
Savings targets linked to real accounts, so progress updates itself.
Business
Outstanding and overdue invoices synced from QuickBooks.
Companies
Your entities, and which card belongs to which.
Taxes
A year split business, deductible and personal, exported as CSV.
People
Invite family to work the same books, or a bookkeeper to categorize the charges.
Access
Your household, and a short list of people who can get in.
Passkeys first
Signing in is the device in your hand. A password is kept as a fallback for a household member who has not enrolled a passkey yet.
Read-only bank access
Plaid holds the bank credentials. Argus keeps a read token, sealed with AES-256-GCM and opened only at the moment of use.
An invitation is a credential
Registration is closed by default. An invite is a random token that expires in seven days and works only together with the address it names, so a leaked link is not a way in.
Callbacks are verified
Plaid has to reach the webhook without signing in, so every delivery is checked against Plaid's signature and stale ones are refused.
Argus is by invitation only. Each household on it has its own books, which no other household can open. Nothing here is sold, shared or advertised against.
Already have a passkey on this device?
Signing in takes one tap and lands you on the Overview. If you were invited and have not registered yet, open the link you were sent — that is what creates the account.