How Hakuna works

Adding something

Three ways, and they end in the same place:

• Type it in. Pick a category and fill in what you know. Nothing is required beyond a provider.
• Upload a document. A policy schedule or statement. It's scanned, then the fields it can read are offered to you as suggestions.
• Forward an email. Each household has its own forwarding address, in Settings. What arrives lands in your review queue.

The last two go through Review first. Nothing is saved to your household until you have looked at each field and approved it, and you can edit anything before you do.

Filling in a record

Each category asks for the handful of things that matter for it — a renewal date for insurance, a payment day for a utility, the last four digits of a card. A record with gaps is still a useful record; the ones worth adding are listed on the record itself so you can see what would help.

Don't put full card numbers, sort codes, PINs or passwords in. Reference fields refuse anything that looks like a payment card. Hakuna is for knowing where things are, not for keeping credentials.

Reminders

A reminder is tied to the record's important date, and goes out at 09:00 on the day it is due. You choose how far ahead. Shared records remind everyone in the household who has reminder emails switched on; records marked "just me" only ever remind you.

When one arrives you can mark it reviewed — which asks for the next date — or snooze it for a week, a fortnight or a month. Pausing reminder emails altogether is a single switch in Settings.

Sharing and privacy

A household holds two people for now, with equal access to everything shared. The "usual manager" on a record is a note about who normally deals with it, not a permission — either of you can see and change any shared record.

Marking a record "just me" keeps it out of the other person's view entirely. Changing a record from shared to private, or back, tells the other member that it happened — a record quietly vanishing is worse than being told.

Invitations

An invitation lasts seven days. Until it's accepted you can send it again — which issues a new link and kills the old one, so a mistyped address stops working — or cancel it, in Settings. The person you invited can decline without creating an account, and you'll be told if they do.

Deleting things

A deleted record is recoverable from "Recently deleted" on the Your things page for 30 days, with its documents intact. After that it's erased. Deleting your account or the whole household has a cooling-off period you can cancel inside — see how we handle your data for the timetable.

Getting your data out

Settings → Your data builds a portable archive of your records, your documents and the household history, and emails you when it's ready. It's downloadable for a week. Another member's private records are never in it.

Signing in from somewhere new

A device we haven't seen before has to confirm a six-digit code emailed to you. Settings lists every device you're signed in on, and lets you sign one out, sign out everywhere else, or do both and reset device trust in a single action. Everything you change about your own account appears in a security history only you can see.

Devices, browsers and accessibility

Hakuna works on current Chrome, Edge, Safari 17 and later, and Firefox, on screens from 320 pixels wide upward — and at 400% zoom. It needs JavaScript.

Everything can be done with a keyboard alone, dialogs trap and return focus, animations stop if your device asks for reduced motion, and no status is shown by colour alone. If something is hard to use with assistive technology, that is a defect we want to hear about — the full position, including what we test automatically and what we check by hand, is published in the repository as docs/accessibility-and-browser-support.md.

Something looks wrong

Check Activity — every change in the household is recorded there with who made it and when. If a document won't open, it's usually still being scanned; anything a scan rejects is deleted and shown as unavailable rather than silently disappearing.