A notion template for your credit journey

Notion has been one of the most recent developments in the world of productivity. The ease of use and the various capabilities have inspired a lot of people to create their own dashboards and take advantage of the full potential of this tool. One of our authors decided to explore this tool and came up with this minimalist template to take care of your credit scores, credit cards and make sure that you take the right steps towards a more financially secure future whether it’s by getting a shiny new card or by getting a flex-worthy FICO score. You can copy the template into your workspace here . Although we encourage you to explore the various functionalities that notion offers, here’s a few tips to utilize this dashboard.

The Overview

As soon as you open the template, you get an overview of your wallet and a database named “Arsenal” (no this is not the soccer club). This is where you input all the data about your cards from the opening date to it’s reward structure.

The sweet bonus of being our reader is that we have already added a bunch of cards to the database and are constantly working on adding more. As soon as you enter the date for opening account, the filters get to work and some backend calculation automatically populates the other two views. This means that when you switch to “Gallery” or “My cards” view, it only shows your cards.

Gallery And My Cards

If you somehow managed to stay under a rock when Notion turned from a tool to a complete full-time hobby and livelihood of “productivity gurus,” let us give you a brief history lesson.

Everything on notion is a kind of small webpage in itself. This not only allows you to form various non-hierarchical connections, but also creates a possibility of creating databases within databases. BUT, that’s not where it ends. This is not just a database management system. It’s a showcase for your creativity so make sure all your dashboards give out minimal hypebeast vibes (just kidding… or maybe not 🙃)

Keeping this in mind, we included high resolution images of card in the “Gallery” view and icons of all the major payment networks to give that x-factor to your dashboard.

On a more serious note, if you move to the “My cards” view, you can easily keep a tab on your current cards. The assumption here is that if any card is not already filled up with all its details in the “Arsenal” you might want to make an effort to update the database. Even if you are not motivated enough, keep an eye out since we will update almost all major US credit cards so all you will have to do is just add your date of opening account, your credit limit and your APR. The template has built in calculations to show you the number of days since the account has been opened, Average age of accounts, Total credit limit and even your 5/24 status (if you don’t know what that means, read our article about credit card dictionary)

Enquiries And Credit Scores

Now that we have a whole database of our cards, we should also keep an eye out on our credit score and the hard enquiries so that we can plan our next move. The “Enquiries” section of the template auto-populates the name of your card, it’s bank, application date and the credit bureaus that were used by the bank once you have filled in the account opening date.

If you don’t know how to figure out the credit bureau, now would be a good time to sign up for email and mobile notifications on Credit Karma (sadly, not sponsored😔) and Experian app. Once you have added this entry alongside your card, you can move to the other view called “Still on report” to get a count of hard pulls on each individual bureau. The template also shows you a date when the hard enquiry will fall off your report (24 months) and also filters out the ones that have already fallen off your report.

Alongside the enquiries, you can create custom views of these databases to get any info that you need. Just as an example we have included a view of all cards that are being counted for your 5/24 status under “Keep an eye out.”

Lastly, you can also track your credit scores. For this, you just need to go to the “edit” view and click on the Today column. You will then be prompted to select the date of entry. Add the year and add your scores from the three credit bureaus. Then, just move on to the yearly view to see your progress. If you want to create a new year, just duplicate the yearly view and change the filter to contain your desired year.

We really hope that you have fun with this template and enjoy using it while taking a right step towards better financial education. Unfortunately, we could not include a graph since notion doesn’t allow that yet but if you figure it out, do share with us. We look forward to your dashboards and credit journey (just make sure you hide your SSN).