For more detail on onboarding sections:

Next in the series: Get Started Series 2: Orientation

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Hi folks, I'm Cam Drury, co-founder and CEO of Canwi. Thanks so much for being here and for taking the first step with us.

The name Canwi comes from something we heard constantly when we first started building. People would sit down with their partner and ask questions like, "Can we buy a house? Can we take time off? Can we retire earlier?" We've come a long way since then, and while it's still early, that original question is still at the heart of everything we do.

The number one thing we hear from our community is that when people take charge of their financial plan, they feel more confident about their money and their future. And that confidence leads to better financial decisions and the clarity to commit to big life choices — whether that's buying a home, taking time off, or retiring earlier. Our goal is to help you understand what's possible so that you can design your life around what matters to you.

Canwi is a platform about money and numbers, but our business is really about helping you live your best life. We started this company because a few years ago, I realised I'd made decisions that left me close to a million dollars worse off after just 10 years versus a mate who'd made better financial decisions and followed a plan. When we went looking for tools, we couldn't find anything purpose-built for Aussies that could help people plan everything from buying their first home through to early retirement and beyond. So we set out to build it.

In today's demo, I'll give you a quick overview of the onboarding flow in Canwi.

Before we get stuck in, just to recap: at its core, Canwi brings together your current financial position, planned future events, ongoing patterns like income and spending, and long-term goals, and combines them in a visual, interactive way, so that you can explore different choices and see how they play out over time.

There are two paths for onboarding. If you're serious about getting fully set up in the tool, I recommend using the full/complete setup, which will guide you step by step through adding your family, your goals, your income, your expenses, your cash, your assets, and your liabilities.

For this example, let's plan as a couple. We'll call them Mark and Hellie. We can add a spouse or de facto partner, or a dependent child. Then we'll set two goals.

This is something I really encourage you to take the time to step back and think about: what are you trying to achieve with your financial plan, and what's most important to you? Here are three great questions you could ask yourself:

Lots of people ask me what makes a great plan, and to me it's this: financial planning isn't really about building towards the biggest number — it's about designing a life that aligns with what matters most to you. If you're planning with a partner, it's also a great idea to talk about these questions together. I paid over $5,000 for advice, and thinking about our goals with my wife was probably the most valuable part of the process.

So we'll put in a couple of goals here.

Next we get into the cash flow section. For cash flow, we go through your income, living circumstances and expenses.

You can provide your income as either pre-tax or post-tax — basically the difference between what's on your contract versus what lands in your bank account. For today, I'll just use the averages, but if I scroll down you'll see a bunch of options, like adjusting the superannuation rate you're being paid, whether you've got private healthcare, whether that's taken out of your PAYG, student loans, and adding multiple incomes. We'll do the same for Hellie — again, I'll set her to the average.

Here we can enter where we live — let's call that Lumon HQ — and let's say we're renting our home for $830 a week.

For expenses, there are three ways you can do this: use our default buckets, start simple with a single bucket covering all expenses (excluding debt repayments), or build your own custom structure. I'll use our default buckets and, for today, the average expenses.

You can see the list of all our expenses down the page — we've got rent, home utilities, and so on. You can adjust all the labels and descriptions, and you can set how each expense is treated from an inflation perspective — for example, this expense will grow at inflation, currently 2.5%. You can also import and export expenses via Excel/spreadsheet. On the right, you'll see a visualisation of your budget breakdown by category, plus a quick summary of your buckets and how they're tracking.

Next, we can add information about our financial inventory — our assets and liabilities.

Cash accounts: you can add transaction accounts, savings accounts, term deposits, and offsets. For now, I'll just add a transaction account with $10,000. You can nominate an account as your default savings account, meaning any excess cashflow gets saved into it (you can adjust this later in cashflow priorities).

Assets: at the top, you'll see we've already added default superannuation accounts for both people with incomes — so Mark and Hellie's default super. You can edit these. Every asset has tooltips to help you understand historical returns you might want to use as a basis for setting your own return rate. For example, right now we've got an annual growth rate of 6.5% — roughly what a balanced portfolio has returned over the last 15 years. But say I know my portfolio is invested in high growth, and I want to be a bit more aggressive than the 15-year return rate — I might choose 8.5%. And we've got $10,000 in this super account. You can also add other assets here, like stocks, vehicles, collectibles, precious metals, and more.

Debts and liabilities: you can add personal loans, mortgages, and HELP debts.

And then we'll land on the home page. Thanks for watching — in the next video we'll cover getting oriented inside Canwi.