Week of July 6, 2026

A public front page, help docs, and cleaner payee names

Ember now has a home page and a set of help pages anyone can read without signing in, and transactions arriving from your bank get a payee name you'd recognize instead of the raw text off the statement.

A front page, and help pages you can read without an account

Opening Ember without an account used to drop you straight onto the login form. There was nothing that said what the product is or how any of it works, which made it awkward to point anyone at.

There's now a public home page at the root of the site, plus six help pages covering getting started, transactions, bank sync, investments, automation, and security. All of it reads signed out. Signing in is otherwise unchanged: a link to a specific page still asks you to log in and then carries you where you were going.

Payees that read like names, not statement text

Your bank sends its own text for every charge: SQ *BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE #42, TRADER JOES #552. When Ember didn't recognize one of those strings, it created a payee named exactly that. A few months of syncing left a payee list full of near-duplicates carrying store numbers, processor prefixes, and reference codes.

Ember now tidies that text before deciding what to do with it (the prefix a payment processor put on the front, the store and reference numbers, the statement boilerplate) and checks the cleaned-up version against the payees you already have. If it recognizes one, the transaction joins that payee and the raw text is remembered, so the same charge lands correctly and immediately from then on. If it doesn't, you get a new payee named with the tidied text rather than the raw string.

It stays cautious about close calls. When two of your existing payees are similar enough that choosing between them would be a guess, it doesn't guess: you get a new payee and the last word. Payees you type yourself, and Venmo counterparties, are left exactly as you entered them.

Improvements

• Tags: Tag suggestions are ordered by what you've been reaching for lately rather than by all-time totals, so a tag you leaned on months ago no longer sits above the one you're using this week. The row picker, the filter, and the bulk picker all agree on that order.
• Transactions: Arrowing down the ledger keeps the focused row clear of the selection bar at the bottom of the screen, instead of parking it underneath where you couldn't read it.
• Investments: In the Holdings tree, the right arrow opens the focused row and the left arrow closes it, the way a file browser works. Enter and Space still toggle.
• Investments: Opening the amount on an automatic Market change row starts you at 2344 instead of 2344.00000000, so there are no trailing zeros to clear before you can type.

Fixes

• Reconciled rows: Approving a reconciled transaction that was still waiting on you to confirm its bank match no longer fails with a misleading read-only error.
• Matching: Two copies of the same transfer can now be matched when they reached you through different channels: one from bank sync and one from a CSV upload, or from two separate CSV files. Two copies from the same import are still kept apart.
• Security: Additional hardening from our ongoing internal review. We look at this continuously, not only when something prompts it.