Shared Goals and Ownership Rules
How shared household goals work and how to use ownership rules to auto-tag transactions as mine, theirs, or ours.
Overview
Two features help households work together without stepping on each other: shared goals for saving toward something as a family, and ownership rules for automatically labelling transactions as belonging to you, your partner, or both.
Household tier required.
Shared Goals
Shared goals live alongside your personal goals and are visible to every member of the household.
Where to Find Them
- Open the household area from the dashboard sidebar
- Select Goals
- The page shows every shared household goal with its progress, target amount, and target date
Who Can Contribute
Any household member who has the Owner, Partner, or Member role can contribute to a shared goal. Viewers can see progress but cannot contribute.
When someone contributes, the goal records the amount, the date, an optional note, and which member contributed it. Open the goal detail view to see the full contribution history.
Personal vs. Shared Goals
Use a personal goal when the target is yours alone — your own emergency fund, a personal trip, an individual TFSA target. Use a shared goal when the household is saving together — a down payment, a family vacation, a renovation.
A good rule of thumb: if more than one person plans to contribute, make it shared.
Editing and Archiving
Owners and Members can edit a shared goal's name, target, or date. Archive a goal once you reach it, or delete it if it is no longer relevant. See Achieving and Archiving Goals for the general flow — shared goals follow the same rules.
Ownership Rules
Ownership rules automatically tag transactions on your shared accounts as Mine, Theirs, or Ours, so you do not have to label every transaction by hand.
What They Do
When a new transaction lands on a shared account, NivoaFlow checks your household's ownership rules. If a rule matches, the transaction is tagged automatically. The tag shows up on the transaction and feeds into household reports so you can see how spending splits across the family.
Creating a Rule
Owners and Partners can create ownership rules.
- Go to the household area and select Ownership Rules
- Select Add Rule
- Choose a match type:
- Account (priority 1) — tag every transaction from a specific shared account
- Merchant (priority 2) — tag every transaction from a specific merchant
- Category (priority 3) — tag every transaction in a specific category
- Pick the matching value from the dropdown — we populate it from your real shared transactions, merchants, and categories
- Choose the tag: Mine, Theirs, or Ours
- Optionally tick Apply to existing transactions to back-fill matching transactions
- Select Create
If you applied retroactively, NivoaFlow tells you how many existing transactions were tagged.
Priority and Conflicts
When more than one rule could match a transaction, the highest-priority rule wins:
- Account rules beat merchant rules
- Merchant rules beat category rules
This means a specific account assignment always overrides a broader category-based rule.
Overriding a Tag on a Single Transaction
You can always change the ownership tag on an individual transaction directly from the transaction detail view, regardless of any rule. Manual changes stick — they will not be overwritten the next time a sync runs.
Deleting a Rule
Open Ownership Rules, find the rule, and select the trash icon. Existing transactions keep their current tags; only future transactions stop being auto-tagged.