We wrote about managing all your accounts in one place at the start of the year. Enough has shifted since then to be worth a second pass, mostly because people keep arriving at this problem with the wrong mental model. They think there is a single app that will suck in everything they own. There isn’t, and understanding why saves a lot of wasted evenings.
What aggregation actually reaches
Open banking is genuinely good at what it does. Give an app permission and it can read your current accounts, savings, credit cards and, increasingly, some investment platforms. Balances update themselves. Transactions arrive without you doing anything. If your question is “how much money do I have right now,” a money app answers it well.
The limits are where people get caught out. Open banking connections expire, typically every ninety days, and need reauthorising. Coverage of smaller building societies is patchy. And the moment you step outside regulated payment accounts, the automatic feed stops.
The half it never sees
Here is the list nothing pulls in automatically:
- Old workplace pensions, which for most people is the largest single pot they own.
- Life insurance and critical illness cover, including death-in-service through an employer.
- Premium Bonds and most NS&I holdings.
- Share certificates and anything held directly with a registrar.
- Property, vehicles and the paperwork attached to them.
- Your will, any lasting power of attorney and where the original documents sit.
That is not a small remainder. For most households it is the majority of the value and almost all of the paperwork that matters in a crisis. It has to be listed by hand, once, and then left alone.
The two-layer approach
The setup that works is layered. Let an aggregator handle the live money, because it is good at it and it costs you nothing to maintain. Then keep a separate, deliberate record of everything else: what it is, who holds it, the reference number and where the document lives.
The second layer barely changes. You build it over a few short sessions, then touch it when something genuinely happens, a new policy, a pension transfer, a house move. It is the part that pays off years later, which is exactly why nobody does it.
Doing it without losing a weekend
Start with one month of bank statements. Every direct debit and standing order points at something you own or something you owe, and working backwards from payments is far faster than working from memory. An insurance premium leads you to a policy. A monthly amount to a provider you half recognise leads you to a pension.
Then go through your email for the word “policy,” “statement” and “renewal.” Between the statements and the inbox you will reconstruct nearly everything in an hour or two.
If you have lost track of an old pension entirely, the government’s free Pension Tracing Service will find the provider’s current contact details from an old employer name.
Keeping it current
The reason these projects fail is not the building, it is the decay. A list that is eighteen months out of date is worse than useless, because someone will trust it.
Tie the review to something you already do. A birthday, the start of the tax year, the week the car insurance renews. Fifteen minutes, once a year, checking that what is written down is still true. That is the whole maintenance burden.
Where FamilySafe fits
FamilySafe is built for the second layer, the part aggregation cannot reach. It holds the full picture of what exists, the documents attached to each thing and who should be able to see what, shared on your terms. Your money app tells you your balance. This tells your family where everything is.
