Your first 10 minutes with GlidePath

You just installed GlidePath. The dashboard is sitting in front of you and you’re not sure where to start. This walks you through the ten minutes that turn a blank app into one that actually shows you something.

What you’ll learn

• How to add the people in your household
• How to add your accounts (even if you only have two)
• How to take your first balance snapshot
• What you’ll see on the dashboard once that’s done

Before you start

You don’t need anything — not even balances. You can put rough numbers in now and refine them later. Worst case: nothing here breaks anything, and your data lives in plain files on your computer you can edit by hand.

Step 0 — Pick your door (30 sec)

On a blank install the dashboard offers one thing: Build your first Money State →, which takes you to /Setup. There you get two doors — import a bank CSV, or type a few balances in by hand.

This walkthrough takes the second door. Typing four numbers is faster than finding a CSV export the first time through, and everything here works the same either way. If you’d rather start from a real export, the import walkthrough picks up from there.

Step 1 — Tell GlidePath who’s in the household (2 min)

Open Household & partners from the top nav (it’s under Household). Add yourself first. Four fields, all required: Full name, a Short label (the compact version used in owner fields and chart legends — “Jordan” rather than “Jordan A Smith”), a Role (primary, spouse, partner, dependent, or other — pick primary for yourself), and your Birth date. Then click Add partner.

Leave the short label blank and the save is rejected with “Name and short label are required. Nothing was saved.” — so fill both.

If you have a spouse or partner you’re planning together, add them the same way with the role spouse or partner. There’s a Retirement planning section on the same form, pre-filled 65 / 85 / 67, that you can leave for later.

One thing this page does not do, and it’s the one people assume it does: adding a spouse here does not set your filing status. Partners drives ownership labels, per-person retirement ages and Social Security claim math. Filing status is a separate field — Household type on /Retirement, offering Joint or Single. It defaults to Joint, so someone planning alone who never changes it is quietly getting married-filing-jointly brackets and standard deduction in every projection. Worth thirty seconds now.

Try it: Open /Partners ↗ (works when the desktop app is running on this computer — just browsing? See the demo)

Step 2 — Add your accounts (4 min)

Now open Accounts & balances from the top nav (under Accounts). This is the list of every place that holds money you care about — checking, savings, 401(k), IRA, brokerage, mortgage, credit cards. Everything that shows up on a statement somewhere.

With no accounts yet, the page’s own CTA is Add your first account. After that, the form lives in the Add… panel near the bottom — and note that it re-collapses after every save, so accounts two through five each mean expanding Add… again. Four fields are required:

• Account name (anything you want — “Chase Sapphire” or just “Joint Checking”)
• Current balance (rough is fine — pull from your last statement or your bank’s website)
• Balance as of (defaults to today)
• Type — one of Liquid (checking, savings, brokerage), Retirement (401k, IRA, pension), Credit Card, Real Estate, or Business

Then click Save account + balance.

Everything else — institution, owner, last four, subtype, notes — lives under Optional account details and can be filled in later. Worth doing eventually: the last four digits let future CSV imports match transactions to the right account automatically.

Debts are not account types. A mortgage, HELOC, auto loan or student loan doesn’t go in that Type list — use the separate New loan form in the same panel and click Create loan.

You don’t need to add every account today. Start with the five biggest. That’s enough for a first Money State and a real net-worth number — though Spending, Cash Flow, Budgets, Subscriptions and Transactions all stay empty until you import transactions, which is a later step, not a missing one.

Try it: Open /Accounts ↗ (works when the desktop app is running on this computer — just browsing? See the demo)

Step 3 — Snap your first balance picture (1 min)

Open Monthly Close from the top nav (it’s under Today). Your balances are fresh, so nothing needs fixing — scroll to the bottom and click Save snapshot & archive.

Two things about that page worth knowing up front. It does not list every account: only Liquid, Retirement and Business ones appear, plus credit cards, which it reads from a separate card tracker. A Real Estate account, a loan, or a Credit Card account you created in Step 2 won’t show here and won’t be snapshotted — those are edited individually on /Accounts. And between the balance tables and the submit button the form also asks for a Close date and a Decision record block (two radio choices with safe defaults) — both fine to leave alone on a first close.

That’s it. GlidePath just froze today’s account balances as your first historical data point. Next month, when you do it again, the difference becomes the first segment of your net-worth trajectory chart.

The snapshot is the seed. After two or three monthly closes you’ll have real movement to look at on /NetWorth.

Step 4 — Look at the dashboard (2 min)

Go back to the dashboard at / — Overview is the first item in the Today ▾ dropdown, and the GlidePath Money wordmark at top-left goes there too. (Monthly Close, where Step 3 leaves you, has no back-link of its own.)

What you’ll see is a Money State — a dated summary of where things stand — and the useful thing about it on day one is that it tells you what it can’t yet do.

You have entered accounts and balances and nothing else, so net worth is real, computed from what you just typed. Cash flow isn’t, and the dashboard says so in as many words rather than showing you a zero:

Money — Needs transaction history. Without transactions, GlidePath can show balances but cannot explain where money is going. Import transactions →

You’ll see the same honesty elsewhere on the page — “Waiting on account history and retirement inputs,” and a cash-flow plan line reading “waiting for recurring income and outflow rows.” This is the app being accurate, not the app failing, and it’s worth recognising because it’s the moment some people decide something is broken. A tool that shows you a confident $0 cash flow when it has no transactions is the one you should distrust.

What you land on is the Money State sentence, not a wall of tiles. To see the numbers underneath it, expand Full read — its subtitle reads “Net worth, spending, what needs you, goals, and the long view.” Net worth sits at the top of the first band, under “Q1 · How am I doing right now?”

What you have actually earned in ten minutes:

• Net worth — the sum of your assets minus your liabilities, from the balances you entered
• A starting point for the trend — today’s snapshot, the first dot on a line that needs a second close to become a line
• A household the planner can reason about — the retirement and tax math need to know who you are before they can say anything

One thing not to go hunting for on this page: the small ? explain markers you’ll read about elsewhere don’t appear on the dashboard. The Explain Lens button in the top bar (the ? toggle, on by default) dims and highlights those markers where they exist — on the deeper pages like /Retirement — and clicking an individual ? there opens that one number’s explanation in a side panel. The toggle itself doesn’t open anything.

Step 5 — Bring in a month of transactions (5 min)

This is the step that lights up everything the dashboard just told you it couldn’t do. Open Import from the top nav (under Trust & Data), drop in a CSV from your bank, and check the preview before saving.

You don’t have to do it today — but until you do, Spending, Cash Flow, Budgets and Subscriptions have nothing to work from, and the Money State will keep saying so. Categorizing that first month picks up exactly here.

What just happened

You went from a blank app to one that knows your household, your accounts, and your starting balances. Every other page in GlidePath — the planner, the cash flow tracker, the debt views — now has the data it needs to start being useful.

You also took the first balance snapshot. That snapshot is the first dot on a line that will eventually be your net-worth trajectory. Add another one in 30 days and the line starts to draw itself.

Where to next

• Categorize a month of transactions without losing your mind — once you’ve imported your first CSV, this is the next step

Ask Glide about this

Open the Ask Glide panel in the top bar and ask: “What’s the difference between net worth and cash flow?” Glide answers concept questions like this without ever seeing your actual numbers.

Common pitfalls

• Balance numbers don’t have to be exact. Round to the nearest hundred dollars if you want — you’ll true them up at the next monthly close, which is an explicit compare-and-adjust step rather than something that happens to you. The one automatic behaviour is a month rollover that carries the same value forward, stamped Auto carry-forward; the page labels those as not verified month-end numbers, precisely so a placeholder never passes as a confirmed statement figure.
• Adding every account on day one is overkill. Five is plenty. Add the credit card you forgot about next week — your data isn’t going anywhere.
• Setup is friendly, not gating. You can skip steps and come back. The app works with whatever data you’ve given it — and says which parts are still waiting.