Vela Finance documentation

Start the conversation

Open the chat with the button below, or save the number and send any message. The first message you send starts onboarding — there is no command to remember.

Onboarding, step by step

Onboarding is five short questions. The assistant remembers where you stopped, so you can answer at your own pace and pick it up later.

Your first transaction

Write what you spent the way you would tell a friend. An amount and a short description are enough; the assistant fills in the category, the account and today's date, then replies with the entry and the new balance.

Plain text

Type it however you like: “spent 45 euros on dinner”, “paid 120 for electricity”, “got 2000 salary”. The amount and a short description are the only required parts; name a date, an account or a currency and those are used instead of the defaults.

Voice notes

Record a voice note and send it. It is transcribed in the background and handled exactly like text — the reply is the saved entry, not the transcript.

Receipt photos

Photograph the receipt. The total, the merchant and the date are read off the image and become one entry. Add a caption if you want to correct or add anything.

Expenses, income and transfers

Three kinds of entry are supported. Expenses and income move one account. A transfer moves money between two accounts you own — name both and each balance is updated in the same step, without counting as spending.

Categories

A category is assigned automatically from the description, matched against the categories in your workspace in whichever language you wrote. Name a category yourself and it wins; one that does not exist yet is created. Every workspace starts with these:

Periods

Every report covers one period. The built-in ones are today, this week, this month and last month; anything else is read out of your message as a custom range.

• Today
• This week
• This month
• Last month
• Selected period

Grouping

A summary can be grouped by category, by member, by currency or by account. Each line shows its share of the total as a percentage, and the report ends with expenses, income and the net for the period.

• category
• member
• currency
• account

Filters

Narrow a report to one category, one account, or both — for example “how much did I spend on groceries this month” or “show last month for Chase Checking”.

Itemized lists

Ask to see the transactions themselves instead of totals and you get them one by one, with the same period, category and account filters. The list is capped at the 20 most recent entries.

Balances

Ask for your balance to see every active account and the total. The balance of the account you touched is also printed on the confirmation after each entry, so you rarely have to ask.

Creating and editing accounts

You can list your accounts, create one, update its details, or archive one you no longer use. Archiving keeps the history and takes the account out of the list. Mention a bank or card the assistant does not know yet and it offers to create it. Only the last four digits of a card or account number are ever stored.

Account types

• Checking — an everyday bank account.
• Savings — money set aside.
• Credit — a card, where the balance is what you owe.
• Cash — notes and coins you hold.
• Investment — a brokerage or fund account.
• Loan — a debt you are paying down.

Importing a statement

Forward a statement as a PDF or CSV and every movement on it is imported into one account in a single step. The header is read to work out which account it belongs to, and the account is created if it does not exist yet. Lines that cannot be read are reported rather than guessed at.

What is read from the header

Before importing, the assistant extracts the bank or card issuer, the account or card numbers printed on the statement, and the period it covers, then confirms them back to you.

Duplicate detection

The same movement often arrives twice — you photographed the receipt and later uploaded the card statement, or two statements overlap by a few days. Duplicates are matched across every account in the workspace, not only the one being imported, and the repeated lines are skipped and counted in the reply. Both halves of a transfer between your own accounts are recognised as one movement.

Reconciling a balance

Tell the assistant the balance printed on your statement and it compares it with the balance it calculated. If they agree it says so and changes nothing; if they do not, it books a single adjustment entry so the account matches the bank.

Base currency and account currency

The base currency is set when the workspace is created, guessed from your phone number. An account in another currency keeps its own balance in that currency and is converted into the base currency for totals and reports.

Exchange rates

Rates come from Frankfurter, which publishes the European Central Bank reference rates. The rate applied is the one published for the date of the transaction, not today's rate, and it is stored on the entry — so a report of last year still uses last year's rates. Rates are cached, and a weekend or holiday resolves back to the last published business day.

When a rate is unavailable

If the rate service cannot be reached and nothing usable is cached, the entry is kept in its own currency and left out of the converted totals, and the assistant tells you that in the reply. A rate is never invented.

Exact amounts

Amounts are stored as whole minor units — cents, not fractions of a cent — so nothing drifts through rounding. The number of decimals follows the currency: the yen has none, most currencies have two, the Kuwaiti dinar has three.

What you can do

Create a workspace, invite someone by phone number, list the members with their roles, and switch which workspace your messages go to. Anything you send lands in the workspace you are currently switched to.

Roles

• Owner — everything an admin can do, plus changing roles and deleting the workspace. The person who created the workspace.
• Admin — records entries, runs reports and invites new members.
• Member — records entries and runs reports, but cannot invite anyone.
• Viewer — read-only. Reports and lists yes, recording or editing no.

How an invite works

An invite creates a pending membership for the phone number you gave, and the invited person gets a message in the language guessed from their country code. Nothing is shared yet. The membership activates by itself the first time they write to the assistant, and that workspace becomes their active one.

Ask for help

Send “help” and the assistant lists what it can do, in your language. It is the same summary you get at the end of onboarding.

Talk to a person

Ask to contact support and your message is emailed to the team at support@usevelafinance.com. Someone reads it and gets back to you.

The 24-hour window

WhatsApp only lets a business send free-form messages for 24 hours after your last message. Inside that window the assistant replies normally. Outside it, anything we send you — a scheduled summary, for example — has to use a message template approved in advance by Meta, which is why those read more formally. Writing back reopens the window.

Rate limit

Up to 15 messages per 60 seconds from one phone number. Go over it and the assistant asks you to slow down; the limit clears within the minute.

File size

Voice notes, photos and statements are accepted up to 20 MB. Anything larger is rejected before it is downloaded — send a smaller photo, or split a long statement.

Your data

What is collected, who processes it and how to have it deleted are all written down. See the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service and the Data Removal page.