Location Insights Documentation

How to read this document

Sections move from purpose → concepts → calculation process → worked examples → edge cases. Formula boxes use plain mathematical notation for clarity; they are conceptual summaries, not API contracts.

• Point lists call out operator-visible behaviour.
• Callouts mark warnings, limitations, or important qualifications.
• Worked examples use round numbers so you can reproduce the arithmetic by hand.

Purpose

Location Insights adds an optional 'where' to the what and how much: tag expenses with the place they happened and the household gains a spend map, rankings of top places and areas, and a split between spending at home and out. Everything about it is opt-in, and capture only ever happens in the foreground at the moment you add an expense.

• A spend heatmap with clustering, plus Top Places and Top Areas
• A home zone that splits spending into at-home versus out
• Quick-pick chips so tagging costs zero typing
• No background tracking — the permission is not even requested

How capture works

• Capture happens only while you are actively adding an expense, only if you have opted in.
• Quick picks offer one-tap chips for Home, saved presets, and places you visit often.
• You can search for a place, accept a suggestion, correct it, or skip it on any entry.
• Place and map lookups are proxied through AccountHouse servers rather than made directly from your device to third-party APIs.

The home zone

Set your home location and a radius, and spending divides into 'at home' versus 'out'. Moving the zone re-labels historical expenses to match, so the split stays truthful.

• One rule decides at-home versus out, applied consistently everywhere.
• A member living elsewhere — a student abroad, for example — can set a personal home override without changing the household's.

What you see

• A heatmap and cluster views of where household money goes, built from aggregated map cells.
• Top Places and Top Areas rankings, and spend by country for travelling households.
• Coverage statistics — how much of the ledger actually carries a location, so you know how complete the picture is.

Consent, in layers

Three independent switches stand between this feature and any capture at all:

• The feature is enabled per household during beta.
• The household owner holds a kill switch that disables location tracking entirely.
• Each member opts in individually on their own device — nobody is opted in by another person.

Retention and deletion

• An optional retention period ages location data out automatically; unset means keep until you delete it.
• You can delete your location data outright at any time.
• Deleting location data does not touch the underlying expenses — only their 'where'.

Privacy, advice limits, and what we do not publish

AccountHouse is a household tracking and organisation tool. It is not a bank, payment processor, tax advisor, or investment advisor. Forecasts, health scores, balances, and alerts are informational.

• Household data is scoped to your household; other families cannot see your ledger.
• Public documentation explains product behaviour and calculation concepts, not proprietary internals.
• Exact scoring weights, anomaly thresholds, cryptography parameters beyond high-level algorithms, and operational detection rules are reserved.
• Location tags are visible to permitted household members as part of the shared ledger.
• Map surfaces show aggregated views; precise point data is used to build them, subject to your retention settings.