This video walks through how Canwi builds your financial picture from the ground up - income, expenses, property, debt, and how events cascade through the whole model. It's a bit more detailed than the others, but if you've ever wondered what's actually happening behind the numbers, it's worth a watch. Feel free to skip it and come back later if you just want to get started.

Next in the series: Get Started Series 4: Events

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Hi, I'm Cam, one of the founders of Canwi. In this video, I want to show you how the things you add flow through into the projections. Before I do that, I want to give you a quick sense of what's actually happening under the hood, because I think that'll change how you think about the tool.

Think of Canwi as a super calculator — a mortgage calculator, an investment property calculator, an income tax calculator, an age pension calculator, all layered on top of one another to build a single connected model and a single output.

Every time you adjust something, we're running thousands, if not tens of thousands, of calculations in the background. And to make sure those calculations are right, we have literally thousands of test cases that run on every release. So whenever you change a number and the chart updates, there's a lot going on behind the scenes to calculate that and make sure it's accurate.

The best way to show you that is to build a plan live. We'll start from scratch and add things one at a time so you can see exactly what's happening at each step.

One thing to flag up front: we're going to be jumping between a few different screens — adding things on Income, for example, then diving into Plan Tables and Yearly Financial Breakdowns to show you the detailed calculations underneath. So don't be surprised if we jump around a bit.

Starting here, we've got a person, they're 33 years old, and we've given them a $100,000 salary. Canwi's already running a huge number of calculations — gross income, income tax, etc. It's also applying wage growth: by default, ASIC requires us to assume wages grow at 3.7% per annum. That's adjustable — you can set it to grow at inflation only, or at some custom rate. We're also making super contributions — the 12% super guarantee — from this income.

Jumping over to Plan Tables, the first thing you'll see is 2026, the current year. This plan starts in June, so we've got seven months, and we're prorating all of the first-year impacts. If you do the maths — $100,000 ÷ 12 is about $8,333 a month — you might notice that value isn't quite what's shown under remuneration income; it's a bit less. That's because this is showing the take-home pay: we're already taking out PAYG tax, which your employer would withhold for you. The raw number is $583,333 (i.e. $8,333 × 7 months, roughly).

We've also got some asset income — dividends from a stock in the plan. Then there's tax: this isn't your total tax paid, it's showing your end-of-financial-year tax reconciliation. Since asset income like dividends doesn't have PAYG withheld, there's some tax to settle up at year-end.

At the bottom, we've got net cash flow — income minus tax. We don't have any expenses yet, so income minus tax equals net cash flow, and our starting balance plus that equals the cash balance at the end of the year.

If you look ahead, you might notice the value in the next year isn't the same — that's because values are adjusted into today's dollars by default. If you switch the toggle to actual dollars, those numbers will match up. By default we show today's dollars, meaning future values are adjusted to reflect their current purchasing power.

Next, I'll add an expense — groceries and rent, $1,000 each. Underneath, you'll notice these grow at inflation — 2.5% per annum by default, again because ASIC requires us to use that assumption. You can adjust the growth rate on these if you want a different rate.

Something worth noting: the graph showing net income after tax versus total expenses shows income increasingly outstripping expenses over time. That's because, with the default assumptions of 3.7% income growth and 2.5% expense growth, there's naturally a widening gap between them, particularly once your income already exceeds your expenses. Again, this is adjustable, but it's the default based on the ASIC (regulator) requirements.

Back in Plan Tables, you can see we now have a lower net cash flow — income minus tax minus expenses — but we're still accumulating some cash flow into our cash balance.

Jumping to Money Flows — this is really important. At the moment, when we have excess cash flow, we're just assuming we save all of it. But you can adjust these assumptions — for example, you could say you want 50% to go into shares, and spend the rest, with none kept in cash. Or something more complex — totally up to you.

Underneath that is shortfall funding priorities. If I go back to the plan and create a shortfall — then check shortfall funding priorities — this outlines how the plan should deal with negative cash flow (expenses greater than income). By default, we draw from cash accounts, but you can customise it — for example, liquidating assets if required, or only using cash as a last resort. (I'll delete that test shortfall now — the wedding expense — and move on.)

Let's add a bit more complexity. Under Home and Real Estate, we'll add an investment property. You can do custom ownership splits here too — it doesn't have to be 50/50. Let's say we're getting $700 a week in rent.

You can enter annual property expenses, which will be used as a deduction (I'll show you that shortly), as well as annual depreciation — which doesn't incur a cash cost but does create a deduction. If you're familiar with Division 40 and Division 43, that's where those get allocated. Let's set $10,000 for each. We'll also add a mortgage against the property, and because it's an investment property, we'll mark that as tax-deductible.

Back in Plan Tables, you can now see debt repayments firing — our mortgage payment is being added, calculated based on the minimum repayments required to pay down the loan. Cash flow is then prioritised — some goes into the CommBank shares we allocated earlier, and some is spent. You can see the impact on our end-of-year balance, which looks like it's staying fairly consistent over time because we're both spending and investing.

I'll also show you the tax deductions — the property expenses and depreciation feed into the tax tab, calculating our tax deductions and taxable income, which then flows into the other elements of the plan.

Now, if we add an event — say we decide to stop renting and move into that investment property — once that's in, if you check the Tax tab, you'll see the deductions have now been zeroed out. We're no longer able to claim those deductions, because we've moved into what was previously an investment property.

That's probably quite dense, but that's basically how everything fits together — how your income, expenses, money flows, and events inside your plan all work together to build a single connected projection.

In the next video, we'll run through events in more detail — what's available, how to use them, and how to build a plan that reflects your real life.

Thanks for watching!