01 · The gap
Generic budgeting apps were not built for a Canadian investor
Most of the well-known personal-finance apps are American, and they are organized around a monthly spending budget. They connect to accounts and sort transactions well, but a TFSA or an RRSP shows up as a generic investment bucket you label with a tag, and the contribution room is math you keep in your own head. For someone whose financial life is mostly registered accounts and a brokerage or two, that is the wrong shape.
Mozaic starts from the other end. It assumes you are Canadian, that you hold registered accounts, that some of your money is in US dollars, and that your investments are spread across more than one brokerage. Everything below follows from those assumptions.
02 · Registered accounts
TFSA, RRSP, FHSA, RESP, and LIRA are first-class
Mozaic treats the Canadian registered account types as native, with the contribution-room rules built in. A TFSA reads as a TFSA, the dollar limit that rises each January is known, and the FHSA annual cap is enforced on the contribution view. RESP and LIRA carry their own status too. You are not tagging a generic account and tracking the room in a separate spreadsheet.
That matters because the registered wrapper changes the decision. Knowing how much TFSA room is left, or whether an RRSP contribution still fits this year, is the kind of thing a budgeting app leaves to you and Mozaic does for you.
03 · Real brokerage coverage
Holdings and cost basis, not just an account balance
Through SnapTrade, Mozaic pulls individual holdings, cost basis, and time-weighted return out of Wealthsimple, Questrade, Interactive Brokers, and the bank-owned direct-investing brokerages, while bank accounts come through Plaid. You see per-position detail across every brokerage at once, not a single balance number you have to break down by hand.
Plenty of tools show you an investment account's total. Fewer show you what is inside it, consolidated across brokerages, which is where a real portfolio actually lives.
04 · Multi-currency
One net-worth number, with US dollars folded in
Many Canadians hold US-dollar positions or a USD-side account. Mozaic is built around that: you pick a base currency, which defaults to Canadian dollars, and every balance is converted into it before your net worth is summed. Each account still shows its own native currency on its card, and the conversion happens only at the consolidated line, using the current exchange rate.
One real limit worth stating plainly: conversions use today's rate rather than the rate on the day of each trade, and if a rate cannot be fetched during a sync, the affected account is left out of the total and flagged rather than guessed at.
05 · Where Mozaic is not the answer
The plain version: what Mozaic does not do
If zero-based envelope budgeting, where every dollar is assigned a job before the month begins, is the centre of how you manage money, Mozaic is not built for that and a tool like YNAB is a better engine. Mozaic does not currently expose a public API, so if you pipe transactions into Beancount or a custom dashboard, that is a real gap on our side; export is CSV and PDF. And Mozaic is a desktop-first web app: it works in a phone browser, but there is no native iOS or Android app yet.
The point of saying this out loud is simple. If those things are what you need, another tool will serve you better, and it is cheaper to find that out here than after you have connected your accounts.
06 · Privacy
Your data stays in Canada
Mozaic runs in Google Cloud's Montreal region, so your financial data stays in Canada under federal PIPEDA and Quebec's Law 25. Every account connection is read-only through Plaid and SnapTrade, so Mozaic never holds a credential that could move money, and data is encrypted in transit and at rest. If your data leaving the country is something you care about, that is a deliberate choice, not an accident. The full posture is on the security page.