How to Track Your Credit Cards in MyFam360 — The Foundation

Most personal finance apps treat a credit card the same way they treat a bank account — one row in a list of “accounts” with a balance number. That works fine if you spend ₹20,000 a month on one card and never touch the others.

It falls apart the moment you carry three cards. The HDFC Millennia for online. The SBI SimplyClick for everything else. The Flipkart Axis for the Big Billion Day binge in October. Each has its own billing cycle, its own minimum due, its own rewards rate, its own annual fee. A single “balance” field can’t model any of that.

MyFam360’s Credit Card Manager is built differently. It treats each card as a first-class object with a cycle, a statement history, a rewards profile, and a relationship to the underlying account. This post walks through the foundation — how to add a card and what’s happening behind the scenes so the rest of the feature works.

If you’re brand new to MyFam360 and haven’t set up your budget yet, the step-by-step family budget guide is the better starting point.

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What the Credit Card Manager Replaces

Before this feature shipped, if you wanted to track a credit card in MyFam360 you had two bad options:

1. Add it as a regular savings account with a manually maintained negative balance — every payment was a separate entry, every statement reconciliation was a spreadsheet exercise.
2. Track it as a revolving loan under the Loans module — got you statements and EMIs but no rewards tracking, no joint cardholders, no cycle awareness.

Neither modelled what a credit card actually is. The Credit Card Manager is the dedicated container for it.

The old revolving-loan workaround is now deprecated. There’s a one-shot migration script (scripts/migrate_credit_card_revolving_loans_to_cards.py) that converts existing revolving-loan rows into proper credit card rows, and a migration banner on the Loans page that points to the new home.

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Step 1: Open the Credit Cards Page

Tap Credit Cards in the sidebar (or the More menu on mobile). If it’s your first time, the Active tab will be empty with a single CTA: Add Credit Card. Three other tabs (Statements, Staged, Rewards) are visible but locked until you add at least one card.

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Step 2: The 4-Step Add Card Flow

Adding a card walks through four screens.

Screen 1 — Basics

• Nickname — a short, human label. “HDFC for groceries” is better than “HDFC Bank”. The nickname is what appears everywhere in the app.
• Issuer — pick from the dropdown (HDFC, SBI, ICICI, Axis, Tata, Standard Chartered, American Express, RBL, IndusInd, IDFC First, Yes, Kotak).
• Card name — the issuer’s marketing name (e.g., “Millennia”, “SimplyClick”). Used as a fallback display label if nickname is empty.
• Last 4 digits — for visual identification only. Never displayed in notifications.

Screen 2 — Cycle & Limit

• Credit limit — the issuer’s approved limit. Used for the utilisation calculation (the credit_high_utilization notification fires at >80%).
• Billing cycle day — the day of the month your statement closes. Most issuers print this on the statement (e.g., “Statement generated on the 15th of every month”). MyFam360 uses this date to materialise statements automatically (more on that in the statements post).
• Payment due day — usually 18–20 days after the cycle day.
• Current outstanding — what you currently owe on the card. If you’re entering a card mid-cycle with an existing balance, fill this in; otherwise leave it at zero.

Screen 3 — Joint Cardholders

• Pick zero or more family members who are co-cardholders.
• The primary cardholder (the user creating the card) gets full edit access by default.
• Joint cardholders can view the card and log expenses; they cannot edit card settings or record payments.
• Family owner and admin roles bypass this and have edit access to every card.

This step is gated by RBAC at the API layer (_require_credit_card_access in credit_card_service.py), so you can’t add yourself as a joint cardholder on someone else’s card by editing the request.

Screen 4 — Confirm & Create

A summary screen showing all four fields. Tap Create Card and the card is saved. Three things happen server-side:

1. A new credit_account row is inserted with the fields above.
2. If a family-scoped account group named “Credit Cards” doesn’t exist, it’s created.
3. A new regular account row is created inside that group with account_type='credit_card', and the card’s linked_account_id is set to it.

The third step is the mirror. Every expense you later log against this card writes to that mirror account, which is what every downstream feature reads.

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Why the Mirror Account Matters

This design decision deserves a dedicated section because it powers everything else in the Credit Card Manager.

A credit card in MyFam360 is not a special, walled-off entity. It’s a regular account inside a special group, with extra metadata layered on top. This means:

• Quick Add works unchanged. The card shows up in the account picker like any other account. The rewards engine watches the mirror’s expense stream and computes points/cashback from it.
• Reports include credit card spend. The Reports → By Account view shows the mirror like any other account. You don’t lose the card’s spending from your regular reports.
• Account migration is clean. If you ever delete the card, the mirror persists and its historical expenses are preserved. Nothing is orphaned.
• One source of truth for the rewards engine. The engine in credit_rewards_service.py sources spend exclusively from expenses via the mirror — it never queries a separate credit_transactions table (one doesn’t exist; AU-Card.3 is deferred indefinitely per project strategy).

The pattern is documented in CLAUDE.md as DL.13 — the mirror relationship is credit_accounts.linked_account_id → accounts.id ← Expense.account_id.

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A Quick Look at What Gets Tracked Per Card

Once a card exists, MyFam360 starts tracking far more than balance:

Field	What it does
current_outstanding	The revolving balance — decremented on payment, never below zero
current_utilization_pct	Real-time outstanding / credit_limit for the high-util notification
current_cycle_window	Computed from billing_cycle_day; used by the rewards engine and the cycle dot
manual_reward_config	JSON config for the per-card chip strip (covered in a later post)
next_due	Statement-aware due-date payload (statement_id, risk_band, amounts, status)
linked_account_id	FK to the mirror account
replacement_history	Tracks card replacements (lost card, upgrade) without losing history

The Dashboard widget reads the aggregate of all active cards and renders the per-card top-3 mini-rows, the cycle progress dot, and an overuse alerter strip.

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Plan Limits and the credit_cards_per_org Quota

Adding cards is plan-gated:

Plan	Max credit cards per family group
Free	1
Duo	2
Pro	5
Family+	∞

The quota is enforced server-side via check_quota(db, family_id, "credit_cards_per_org") before the card is created. Hitting the cap returns a 402 with an upgrade CTA in the modal.

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What This Means For You

If you have credit cards and you’ve been tracking them informally (or not at all), the Credit Card Manager is the part of MyFam360 worth setting up first.

Concrete next step: open MyFam360, tap Credit Cards → Add Credit Card, and add just the card you use most often. Don’t try to add five cards at once — get one set up correctly, see the mirror appear in the Accounts list, log one expense against it from Quick Add, and then add the rest.

The 4-step add flow takes about 90 seconds per card. By the time you’ve added two, you’ll have noticed the mirror group appear in your Accounts list, which is the visual signal that the foundation is working.

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See Also

• Credit Card Statements in MyFam360 — How the Cycle Closes Itself
• Recording a Credit Card Payment with the Impact Preview
• How the Credit Card Rewards Engine Works in MyFam360
• What’s New in MyFam360 — the Roundup