Sure

Moving off Maybe or a spreadsheet

Start a fresh Sure instance from the Docker guide, create the first account and close signups if the server is reachable from the internet. Import a few months of CSV history per account, set opening balances, then reconcile each balance against a real statement before importing older data. Check that transfers between your own accounts are matched rather than counted as income and spending, and review pending matches when auto-matching is uncertain. Very large historical imports can exceed a 512 MB container, so import in batches or raise the memory limit temporarily.

Running a shared household budget

Invite household members and decide per account who can see or edit it, then set monthly category budgets, with rollover where unspent money should carry forward. Use goals in the Plan area for savings targets tied to specific depository accounts. Confirm that a member sees only the accounts shared with them in lists, sparklines and insights, since recent releases tightened those boundaries. Turn on preview features in preferences only for users who want the Plan, Bills and Spending vs normal views while they mature.

Keeping categorization under control

Create rules for recurring payees first, order them so specific rules run before general ones and use Stop processing for exceptions. Preview the match count of a rule before activating it. Try the Bayes classifier against your own history and inspect its results before enabling it, or configure an LLM provider for categorization and merchant detection if you accept sending transaction data to it. Lock categories or amounts that a provider sync must not overwrite.

Tracking loans, property and investments

Enter loan terms, interest rate and insurance to get a repayment schedule and payoff projection, and record rate changes on adjustable loans. Link investment accounts through a supported broker or record trades manually, then check cost basis, fees and splits on the holdings view. US and UK property values can come from valuation providers such as RentCast, Realie or Chimnie. Verify that the daily market-data import is running after upgrades by checking the cron entry in the Sidekiq dashboard.

Connecting an AI agent safely

Decide whether you want the built-in chat, an external agent, or MCP only. For local inference, run the AI Compose profile with Ollama and size timeouts as the AI guide describes. For external agents, prefer OAuth client registration over a static token, route traffic through Pipelock's MCP proxy and remember that write-capable tools can change categories, budgets and transactions. The assistant can only see the household data of the authenticated user, so use a dedicated user if you want a narrower scope.

Operating and upgrading a production instance

Pin an explicit image tag in SURE_IMAGE_TAG rather than a floating channel, especially while the calendar-version transition pauses promotion of latest and stable. Take a backup, pull the web and worker images, restart and check the System Health page and worker logs. Practise a restore with restore.sh on a second host, because dumps are written with PostgreSQL 17 tools from the Sure image. Set POSTHOG_FEEDBACK_ENABLED=false if you do not want the anonymous product-improvement monitoring added in 0.7.6.