Your First Week with PrivLedge: A Step-by-Step Setup Tutorial

Our Getting Started overview covers what PrivLedge does — import, reconcile, categorize, report. This post is the companion piece: a hands-on, screen-by-screen tutorial for your first session with the app. Follow along on iPhone or Mac; the flow is the same on both.

Step 1 — First launch: two quick choices

On first launch PrivLedge asks for the only setup it needs:

  1. Your profile — Freelance Pro or Salaried Employee. This isn’t cosmetic: the relevant tax calculations and Home-screen features adapt to your income type. You can change this later in Settings without changing your existing transactions or categories.
  2. Tax region — you’ll see the app is set up for 🇮🇳 India (more regions are on the roadmap), so slab rates, advance-tax dates, and ITR categories are right by default.

Confirm the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and that’s it — no account creation, no email, no bank login. You land on the Home screen in under a minute.

🎬 Screen recording: first-launch-profile.mp4 First launch — choosing a profile and confirming the India setup.

One thing you won’t be asked for yet: Face ID. PrivLedge deliberately skips the biometric prompt while the app is empty — a lock protects data, and you don’t have any yet. It comes back at exactly the right moment (Step 4).

Step 2 — Do a practice import with the built-in sample

An empty finance app is a wall. Tap Import Statement on the empty Home screen and PrivLedge offers two ways in: Open Sample_Statement.csv — a ready-made statement from a fictitious bank, nothing real — or Import My Own Statement if you already have a file handy. (Want the lay of the land first? See how it works is a four-page tour of the core loop — import, reconcile, on-device auto-categorization, tax reports — and its last page lands on the same two choices.)

The Import Statement chooser on the empty Home screen: Open Sample_Statement.csv, or Import My Own Statement

The sample isn’t a canned slideshow. Choose it and PrivLedge hands the file to the real import flow — only the file picker is skipped — and you drive every step yourself: the bank field arrives pre-typed with Sample Bank, so you tap Add, then Parse Statement, review the summary, and Accept & Save. It’s exactly what your first real statement will go through, with nothing at stake.

The guided sample import: Sample_Statement.csv selected, the bank field pre-typed with Sample Bank, and a tip pointing at Add

Notice the small blue tips along the way — they sit at each decision point (the bank pick, the Parse button, the summary review) and stay on through your first real import before getting out of the way. You can bring them back any time from Settings → Help & Feedback → Show Import Tips.

While the sample is loaded, a yellow banner reminds you it’s not real money. When you’re done poking around, tap Delete on that banner and every trace of the sample is deleted — the app is back to a clean slate for your real statements.

Step 3 — Your first real import

Export a statement from your bank’s site or app — PDF, CSV, or XLSX all work — and open it in PrivLedge (Import Statement → Import My Own Statement, or just share the file to the app). PrivLedge tries to identify the bank format; if it cannot identify the bank confidently, choose it yourself. The screens are the same ones the sample walked you through — pick the bank, parse, review, accept — and the import tips stay on for this first real run.

Two things worth knowing on this screen:

  • Password-protected PDF? You’ll be prompted for the password inline. Once unlocked, a Stored Copy option appears: keep the preserved copy of the statement locked (you’ll re-enter the password to view it later) or store it unlocked. Your call, per statement.
  • Hit Parse and review the summary before anything is saved. PrivLedge flags likely duplicates (same date, amount, and description within a 3-day window — so overlapping statements don’t double-count) and cross-checks the running balance across every parsed row. A statement that doesn’t add up is marked Unverified rather than silently accepted.

Happy with the summary? Accept & Save, and the transactions are in.

The import summary: parse counts, credit/debit totals, and the running-balance check before anything is saved

Step 4 — Now turn on Face ID

Right after your first successful import — the moment you finally have data worth protecting — PrivLedge offers to lock itself with Face ID / Touch ID. One tap, one system consent dialog, done. (If you skip the nudge, the switch lives in Settings.)

Privacy & Security in Settings: the Require Face ID / Touch ID switch, and Store Statements Locked

While you’re on that Settings screen, note Store Statements Locked — the switch that governs whether preserved copies of password-protected statements stay encrypted (Step 3’s Stored Copy choice, as an app-wide default).

Step 5 — Reconcile until the balance is clean

If your import came in Verified, skip ahead. If not, open the reconciliation workspace from the statement’s entry in the import history. The running balance is recomputed live as you work, with any discontinuity highlighted — reorder same-date transactions, fix an amount, or delete a spurious row until it’s clean. Two shortcuts handle the most common statement gaps in a couple of taps: snap the closing balance to the computed value, or back-calculate the opening balance from a reference closing balance.

The reconciliation workspace: Review → Reorder → Recalculate → Reconciled, with the live running balance per row

Step 6 — Teach it your categories

You can assign every transaction to an Income Tax category. In week one, start by correcting the transactions that need attention — tap a transaction, pick the right category, and move on. PrivLedge Pro can train a private, on-device classifier from enough of those corrections, then use it to suggest categories in batches. (Why this habit pays off is a whole post of its own.)

Transactions filtered to Uncategorized, with the categorized progress bar tracking 18 of 22

Step 7 — Read your first reports

With one statement imported, reconciled, and categorized, open Reports: taxable income, expenses, and net for the tax year up top, then the report list — income, period breakup, expenses, estimated tax computed from your categorized transactions (with advance-tax installments broken out), and a ledger-balance check for any date. Everything is scoped to a tax year; the year switcher up top moves all of it at once.

The Reports tab: taxable income, expenses, and net for the tax year, above the report list

The Home screen, meanwhile, has turned from an empty state into a dashboard:

  • Data-integrity and tax-readiness scores — how much of your history is reconciled and categorized, so you always know how far from “filing-ready” you are.
  • Action points — the shortest path to green, like the uncategorized transactions still waiting on you.
  • Tax insights — flags from the rules engine, like presumptive-income eligibility, plus the countdown to the next advance-tax due date.

The Home dashboard after week one: integrity and readiness scores, action points, advance-tax countdown, and presumptive-tax insights

The week-one rhythm

That’s the whole setup. From here, PrivLedge is a small recurring habit rather than a project: when a new statement arrives, import it, glance at the summary, correct the odd category. Ten minutes a month keeps the readiness score green — and filing season becomes a formality.

Questions, or a statement format PrivLedge didn’t recognise? Tell us via support — the format registry grows with every report.

PrivLedge’s categories, reconciliation results, and reports are tools to help you review your records; they are not tax, accounting, or legal advice, and they are not an official tax filing.