Creating an account takes about 90 seconds. Securing it properly takes another two minutes. Most of the people who write to us with "ReservWise didn't catch a payment" or "my reserves look wrong" skipped the second part.
This walkthrough covers both — sign-up and the post-sign-up basics that make every other feature behave correctly.
Sign up
Go to reservwise.com/#signup, enter your email, choose a password, and confirm. We send a verification link immediately — click it before your session expires (24 hours).
Use a real email you check daily. Reserve alerts, billing receipts, and the occasional security notice all go there. We don't sell your address and we don't send a newsletter you didn't ask for.
Pick a real password
The signup form will accept anything 12+ characters, but if you're using a password manager — and you should be — let it generate a 20+ character random string. ReservWise touches enough financial context that a reused password is a genuinely bad idea.
If you don't have a password manager yet, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Apple Keychain are all fine. Pick one before you set the password and you'll never need to think about it again.
Turn on two-factor auth — the setting most users skip
Open Settings → Security and add a TOTP authenticator (Authy, 1Password, Google Authenticator, anything that supports the standard). SMS is a fallback, not a primary — phone numbers get ported.
Why this matters more for ReservWise than for, say, a to-do app: your reserves data plus connected bank accounts plus invoice history is enough context for someone to socially engineer a wire fraud against your business. 2FA closes that hole. Two minutes, one time.
Fill in your profile basics
Three fields actually matter:
- Legal name & business name — used on your invoice PDFs and Stripe payouts. Get them right now or be annoyed later.
- Time zone — drives your monthly reserve cycle. If you're set to UTC and you live in PST, your "month" is off by hours and Lean Month Mode triggers will look weird.
- Business entity type — affects your tax reserve rate. See Choosing your business entity type for the tradeoffs.
Connect your first income source
You can use ReservWise without connecting anything — it'll work off manual income entries — but you'll get tired of typing within a week. Connect at least one of:
- A bank or business checking account via Plaid — see Connecting Plaid for live income data.
- Stripe for invoice-driven income — auto-imports invoices, fees, and payouts.
You can connect both. Most freelancers eventually do.
What to do next
- Run through the 10-minute new-customer checklist to make sure nothing important is unset.
- Read Setting up your first six reserves — the core mental model for everything else.
- If you bounce off anything, email a human. We answer every message.
Setup is unsexy work. Do it well once, and the rest of ReservWise quietly does its job for the next year.