Organize your family life with ease

There are two ways to join a family in FamilyMatters:

1. Parents/caregivers can register directly as family owners without any invitation - simply sign up and create your family.
2. Other family members join through invitations sent by the family owner. The owner sends email invitations from Family Settings, and invited members receive a secure link to register and automatically join the family with appropriate permissions.

Meal planning helps you organize weekly meals for your family.

1. First, add dishes to your family's recipe collection.
2. Then go to "Weekly Planning" to assign dishes to different days and meal categories (breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.).
3. You can edit or remove planned meals anytime, and the system shows you a clear weekly overview.

The expense system helps you manage your family budget effectively.

1. Add incomes first: Record family member incomes to establish your budget baseline.
2. Record expenses: Add expenses by category (housing, food, transport, entertainment, etc.).
3. Automatic categorization: The system automatically categorizes expenses and shows visual charts of your spending patterns.
4. Custom categories: Manage expense categories to fit your family's specific needs.

This gives you complete visibility into your family's financial health.

Go to "Dishes" to add your family recipes. Each dish can include:

• Ingredients with precise measurements
• Step-by-step preparation instructions
• Cooking time and difficulty level
• Photos to make recipes more appealing

Organization features:

• Organize dishes by categories
• Mark favorite recipes
• Share recipes with other families
• Use search to quickly find specific dishes when meal planning

Creating a well-organized ingredient database is one of the most valuable investments you can make in Family Matters!

Benefits include:

• Automatic shopping lists: Properly structured ingredients with correct units enable automatic shopping list generation from your meal plans.
• Precise quantities: Plan your weekly meals and automatically get a shopping list with exact quantities needed.
• Reproducible recipes: Consistent measurements ensure your recipes are reproducible every time.
• Faster recipe creation: Organized ingredients make recipe creation much faster for the whole family.

Activities help track what your family does together or individually, providing valuable insights into family engagement.

What you can track:

• Various activity types: sports, hobbies, work, family time
• Individual or group activities
• Time spent and frequency patterns

Benefits:

• Shows patterns of family engagement over time
• Helps plan better family time and activities
• Use the calendar view to see all family activities at a glance

Yes, your privacy is our priority. Your family data is completely secure and private.

Security measures:

• All family data is encrypted and stored securely
• Data is only visible to your family members
• You control who joins your family through email invitations

Your control:

• We don't share your data with third parties
• You can delete your family data anytime
• Each family operates in its own secure, isolated space

If you experience any issues, we're here to help!

First steps:

1. Check these FAQs for common solutions
2. Make sure your browser is up to date and JavaScript is enabled

For technical problems:

• Try refreshing the page
• Log out and back in
• Clear your browser cache

Get help: If problems persist, contact our support team with details about what you were trying to do when the issue occurred.

We provide data export capabilities to ensure you always have access to your information.

Currently available:

• Export expense data to Excel format for personal records
• All your data is automatically backed up on our secure servers

Coming soon: We're working on comprehensive data export features for all family data.

Need specific exports? Contact our support team and we'll help you get the information you need.

Start small and gradually add more features to build sustainable family habits!

Getting started:

1. Set up ingredients properly - This is crucial for automatic shopping lists
2. Add meal planning - Start with basic expense tracking
3. Encourage participation - It works best when everyone contributes

Pro tips:

• Use photos in your recipes and activities to make memories more vivid
• Regular weekly planning sessions help keep everyone organized and connected
• Remember: investing time in ingredient setup now saves hours later when creating recipes and shopping lists!

Yes! Sharing dishes helps build a community of recipes.

1. Go to your dish collection and click the "Share" button on any dish.
2. Choose which families you want to share with from your network.
3. Shared dishes appear in the other family's collection as read-only recipes they can copy to their own collection.

Note: You can only share with families you're connected to through the invitation system.