Why add accounts that don't support Open Banking

Your net worth, your savings total and the whole picture of where you stand are built from the accounts you've added. Leave out a cash ISA with £8,000 in it and Maji will show you as £8,000 worse off than you are. Every number that follows, including your Financial Healthcheck score, is then working from a picture that isn't yours.

Debts matter just as much here. A credit card or loan that Maji can't see makes things look rosier than they are, and that's the more expensive mistake of the two.

Your financial planner takes today's numbers and runs them years ahead, so a gap now throws off every year after it. An £8,000 pot left out is £8,000 that never gets to grow over the years ahead, and the retirement income or house deposit date you're shown is worse than the one you're actually on track for. Add the account and the whole forecast shifts with it.

Forgotten accounts are common and expensive. The Pensions Policy Institute estimates that £31.1bn now sits in lost UK pension pots, spread across almost 3.3 million pots holding an average of £9,470 each, mostly because people change jobs and old paperwork stops arriving. Among savers aged 55 to 75, the average lost pot is £13,620. Dormant savings accounts get forgotten just as easily.

Listing every account in one place, including the ones you can't connect to, is the easiest way to stop that happening. The old workplace pension and the savings account you opened for a house deposit six years ago stay in front of you instead of quietly disappearing.

Once an account is in, it counts towards your net worth, your savings and debt totals, and your financial planner. If you work with a Maji coach, they see the same complete picture you do, so you're not spending the session filling in gaps.

There's one thing a manual account can't do. Insights and budgeting need transaction data, which only a connected account can give us, so anything you add by hand won't show up in either. It still counts everywhere your balances matter, which is most of what Maji does.

Adding an account manually means entering a name, a type and a balance. That's it. No bank credentials, no ongoing access to your account, nothing shared with your provider. If you're wary of connecting accounts at all, this gets you most of the same benefit with less to think about.

A manual account won't refresh on its own, so the balance is whatever you last told us. Updating it once every couple of months is plenty for most people, and you only need the balance, not individual transactions. Pairing it with your pay day is an easy way to remember.

Open Banking coverage also keeps growing. If your provider becomes available later, you can switch the account over to a live connection and keep everything you've already built up.

If you're not sure where to start, add your largest missing balance first. That single entry usually makes the biggest difference to what Maji can tell you.