Expenses Tracker — Methodology Handbook

The Expenses Tracker turns everyday money movements into a clear picture of where your money comes from and where it goes. Log income and expenses, categorise them, set a monthly budget per category, split money across accounts, import a bank statement or scan a receipt — and the dashboard keeps your cash flow up to date automatically. It's free, private, and needs no signup to try.

👉 Open the tracker: calculatorai.app/expenses

1. What it tracks

Each row in the ledger is one transaction — either money in or money out:

Type — Expense (money out) or Income (money in). This single switch drives every total: cash flow is simply income minus expenses.
Amount — always a positive number; the type decides the sign. Pick the currency per transaction (defaults to your account currency).
Category — one of the built-in categories, or your own free-text label. Choosing Other reveals a box where you can name the category yourself (e.g. "Pet", "Charity", "Bonus"), and it's remembered from then on.
Merchant / source — who you paid, or where the income came from.
Date — the date the money actually moved (not when you logged it). This is the date the ledger sorts and groups by.
Account — optionally, which of your accounts the transaction belongs to (see §4).
Repeats — mark a transaction weekly, monthly or yearly and it becomes a recurring series that materialises its future occurrences automatically. Each generated occurrence is a full copy of the original, account included, so a salary set to repeat monthly keeps landing in the same wallet and that wallet's balance keeps following it. Occurrences are counted from the series' first date and clamped to the end of a short month, so a payment dated the 31st falls on the 28th in February and returns to the 31st in March instead of drifting. If the charge day changes — you move the latest occurrence from the 1st to the 7th — the series follows the new day from then on.
Description, notes & receipt photo — optional free text and an attached receipt image (stored privately).

2. The dashboard

The Dashboard tab turns your ledger into an at-a-glance overview. Every figure is shown in the currency you pick from the header switcher — transactions logged in different currencies are converted at live exchange rates, so a mixed-currency ledger still reads as one coherent picture.

Income / Spent / Net — headline totals for the transactions in view, with a savings-rate badge.
Cumulative income vs spending — an interactive area chart of money in against money out over the period, with a hover tooltip.
Spending by category — a full-width donut breaking down where the money went. Hover a slice to see its newest transactions with their dates; click it (or its legend row) to open every transaction behind the number, with how it compares to last month and the category's budget for this month.
Income vs spending by month — monthly bars with a styled hover tooltip. Click a month to see its transactions, with income, spent and net for it.
Top merchants and a budget summary for the current month. Click a merchant to see every purchase from it, how many, and the average.
Filters — narrow the whole dashboard by date range (This week, This month, This quarter, This year, or a custom range) and by category — a list of ticks, several categories at once. The Transactions tab adds the same for wallets.

2a. Dashboard › Analytics

The dashboard's second view reads the whole ledger over one set of filters, chosen from three dropdowns and a toggle:

Period — this month, last month, 3 / 6 / 12 months, year to date, all time, or any two dates on the calendar. Every bounded period is compared with the same number of days immediately before it (a month against the month before, a fortnight against the previous fortnight): the previous window is drawn dashed on the trend, and every figure that can carry a change shows it against that window.
Categories — as many as you like at once. "Food & Dining + Groceries" is one question, and every card below answers it for that set only.
Accounts — one wallet, several, or all.
Spending / income / both, and a merchant or description search.

The granularity follows the window on its own — up to six weeks by day, up to about six months by week (Monday-anchored), longer by month — so a year is twelve bars, not 365.

What it draws, each from the same filtered rows: income, spent, net and savings rate; spend per day, per transaction and the number of active days; the recurring share of spending against one-off; the largest expense; income vs spending over time with the previous period dashed; spending by category (share of the window) and the same categories stacked per period (switchable to %) and as separate lines, so two or three categories can be compared over months; category ranking with the change against the previous period (a rise in a cost is red); top merchants with their share and change, and the merchants that appeared for the first time in the window; income sources; spending by weekday as an average per occurrence of that weekday (five Saturdays divide by five); budgets in the window — each monthly cap multiplied by the months the window covers, against what was actually spent; by account; and the ten largest transactions, each opening its row.

Tapping a category or a merchant anywhere on the page adds it to the filter. The filters are remembered the way the dashboard's are.

3. Budgets

On the Budgets tab you can set a monthly spending cap for any expense category. Each category shows this month's spend against its limit as a live progress bar — green while you're within budget, red once you cross it. Budgets are optional and independent per category; leave a category without a limit and it simply tracks the running total. Custom categories sit under the built-ins with the pencil to rename or re-icon them and the bin to remove them. A built-in category can be renamed too: hover its name and press the pencil — "Food & Dining" can read "Еда" everywhere it is printed, while every transaction keeps its category underneath, so nothing moves and the default name is one click away.

You can plan a whole budget at once with the Budget Calculator (see §8): enter your income, split it across categories using the 50/30/20 method, and send the recommended limits straight back into the tracker as your budgets.

4. Accounts & transfers

The Accounts tab lets you split your ledger across the real accounts your money lives in — cash, checking, savings, credit card, investment or other (the Other type lets you name it yourself, e.g. "Crypto" or "PayPal"). Each account has an opening balance and shows a live balance = opening + income − expenses of the transactions assigned to it. A total across all accounts is shown in your display currency. Each account card is coloured by how it stands: violet at zero, green with money on it, red below zero.

The opening balance is what was in the account on the day you started tracking: you enter it once and never again. Money arriving afterwards — a salary, a refund — is an income transaction assigned to the account, which is what makes the balance move. An account is therefore the place money sits (a card, a cash wallet, a bank account), not a source of income; the source is the transaction's category.

A transaction does not have to belong to an account, and one that doesn't counts towards no balance — the Accounts tab reports how many such transactions exist. To see which ones, filter the Transactions list by account: it lists every account plus Unassigned. Every row in that list also shows the account it belongs to, so any balance can be traced back to the transactions behind it.

Transfers move money between two of your own accounts. A transfer is not income or expense — it never shows up in cash-flow, category or dashboard totals; it only adjusts each account's balance (money leaves one, arrives in the other). Transfers are cross-currency aware: when the two accounts use different currencies, the arriving amount is pre-filled at today's rate and you can adjust it to what actually landed. All in the amount field fills in everything the source account holds, and the line under it shows what is available (amber if you type more).

5. Adding transactions

Manual entry

The Add transaction button opens a form: choose expense or income, enter the amount and currency, pick a category, add the merchant, date, account, an optional description and a receipt photo. Editing an existing transaction opens the same form pre-filled.

It remembers what you usually type. Under the merchant field the form offers the merchants you enter most often (with a small count), narrowing as you type; tapping one fills the merchant and, unless you already chose a category by hand, the category you usually file that merchant under. Under the description field it offers the descriptions that went with that merchant — "Groceries", "Household" — so a weekly shop is two taps. The hints are built from your own ledger in the browser; nothing is looked up elsewhere, and sample rows are never suggested.

In the Transactions list every date header carries the day's total: green when more came in than went out, red otherwise, with the in/out split beside it on wider screens. Amounts are converted into the display currency before they are summed, like every other total on the site.

Import — one button, three sources

The Import button opens a picker with three ways to bring transactions in:

Bank statement (PDF) — Pro. Upload a card or bank statement PDF in any language from any bank; the AI reads every transaction across the whole statement period, then you review the extracted rows and import. It even reads digitally-signed statement files (the signed PDF containers some banks export) by extracting the embedded PDF automatically.
Receipt photo — Pro. Photograph or upload a receipt and the merchant, total, date and a suggested category are extracted into a pre-filled Add form. A screenshot of a card or payment-app list is read the same way, one row per transaction with its own date and currency, into a review sheet where you tick, edit and save — nothing is added by itself.
CSV file — free. Upload any bank or spreadsheet export; an AI assistant proposes the column mapping (date / amount / description), you review a live preview, then import. Amounts and dates are parsed forgivingly. AI auto-categorisation of imported rows is the Pro part; the import itself is free.

From a calculator

Calculators such as Tip / Bill Split and the Subscription Audit can send a computed amount (or a batch of subscriptions) straight into the tracker — see §8.

6. AI weekly insights

The AI tab is where the weekly read lives; the dashboard keeps a one-line link to it. Pro members get an analysis that reads your whole ledger and writes a personalised summary: what's working, watch-outs (overspending, budget breaches), recurring patterns it noticed, and concrete next steps to save. It's grounded strictly in your own numbers — budgets, categories, subscriptions and merchants — and is guidance, not financial advice.

The tab opens on the last analysis you generated, and flags it when your ledger has changed since. Writing a new one is always an explicit click, never automatic.

7. Recurring & subscriptions

Any transaction marked to repeat (weekly / monthly / yearly) becomes a series. The Subscriptions tab lists every recurring income and expense, normalises each to a monthly figure so you can see the true monthly cost of everything that repeats, and lets you pause, stop or delete a whole series. A known service wears its logo on the row (Netflix, Spotify, Adobe…); anything else wears its category glyph. Due occurrences are created automatically when you open the tracker, so the ledger stays current without manual re-entry.

Pause keeps the series and its cadence but creates nothing while it is paused — a gym membership frozen for the summer, a tool you are not using this quarter. The row stays on the list with a "paused" badge and drops out of the monthly total and the calendar. Resume restarts it from the day you press it: the months it sat paused are never back-filled, and the day of the month you chose is kept. Stop is final — the cadence is cleared and past rows stay as ordinary transactions.

The Subscription Audit calculator can push a reviewed list of subscriptions into the tracker as recurring transactions in one step, and the Subscription Tracker hands a single service over the same way — its price, cycle and the date of its LAST charge that already happened open the add form filled in (never the next, future date: the ledger records what has left the account).

Merchant logos. A known brand wears its logo automatically; for anything else the form has a "Website (for the logo)" field — type vodafone.ua once on any transaction of that merchant and every row with the same name shows the site's logo.

Only what has happened is in the ledger. A transaction dated after today — a subscription's first charge that has not come yet, a planned payment — is scheduled: it appears on the Calendar tab and as a series on the Subscriptions tab, but not in the Transactions list, the dashboard, analytics, budgets or account balances, until its day. A quiet line above the list counts them. The same rule holds in the Business P&L.

Linked to the Subscription Tracker. A series handed over from the Subscription Tracker stays THAT subscription (subscription_id); a series whose merchant matches a subscription's name can be linked with the chain icon on its row (the row then shows "Synced"). For a linked pair, pausing, resuming, stopping, deleting or editing the price / currency / name / cycle on either side asks "Only here / In both" and, on "both", applies the same change in the other tracker through its own rules (a cancelled subscription stops the ledger series; past rows stay). Unlinked series are untouched. The link exists for the personal ledger only, never inside a shared wallet. The workspace calendar's quick actions use the same link.

7a. The calendar

The Calendar tab draws the ledger as a month: every day a box, the day's transactions written inside it with the day's net in the corner, and on the days ahead the subscriptions that will be charged then — projected from the last real occurrence of each series, the same arithmetic the Subscriptions tab shows as "next". Tap a day and the panel beside the grid lists that day's rows with income, spent and net, and offers to add a transaction already dated that day; tap a row to edit it.

The same panel is where you write your own dated lines — "pay the rent, 14:00, $1,200", "a client at 11:30, pays $80". Each has a title, an optional time and amount in any currency, a note, and a checkbox; open one to edit it, move it to another day by tapping that day, or delete it. On the morning of the day a notification repeats the line, time and amount included. What you write on this calendar also appears on the workspace calendar, beside your other dates; the tracker's calendar shows only this ledger and never pulls in other trackers.

Events belong to the ledger you are looking at. In your own ledger they are yours alone. Inside a shared wallet (§9a) they are the wallet's: either partner can write one, both see it, the morning notification reaches everyone in the wallet, and a line the other person wrote is marked with their name. Your personal events never appear in a shared wallet, and a wallet's events never appear in your personal ledger or on your workspace calendar.

On a phone the month becomes the compact grid a calendar app draws — numbers with coloured dots — and swiping sideways changes the month; the day's details open underneath.

8. Built-in calculators

The Expenses Tracker is wired to the calculator library so you never copy-paste numbers between the two:

Budget Calculator (50/30/20) — opens seeded with your real monthly income; plan category amounts, then apply them back as your budgets in one click.
Subscription Audit — review your subscriptions, then send them into the tracker as monthly / yearly recurring expenses.
Tip / Bill Split, Cost of Living, Cost Per Use, Sales Tax, Savings Goal and more, reachable from the calculator menu in the header.

The same works in reverse: while using one of these calculators you'll see an Add to Expenses Tracker button, so a quick calculation becomes a logged transaction or budget.

9. Exporting your data

CSV — always free. Download your full ledger as a spreadsheet at any time, on any tier. Your data is always yours to export.
PDF report — Pro. Generate a premium branded report: an overview page (income / spent / net, spending-by-category bars, monthly cash flow, top merchants, accounts, budgets) plus a full paginated transactions table, all in your display currency.

9a. A shared wallet (two people, one ledger)

Everything above describes your ledger. A shared wallet is a second one, kept together with somebody else — a partner, a flatmate, a business associate — and it behaves like its own tracker with its own transactions, wallets and budgets.

A shared wallet belongs to this tracker only. It is not the same thing as a shared portfolio: sharing your expenses with somebody does not give them your investments, and the two lists never appear in each other's switcher. Sharing two trackers with the same person means two wallets — separate membership, separate roles, separate exports.

Your personal ledger never changes and is never mixed in. The switcher next to the tracker's title (and the list in the sidebar) chooses which ledger you are looking at; totals, charts, budgets and the AI answers are always about the one on screen. A joint dinner does not quietly become part of your personal spending, and your own ledger stays invisible to the people you share the wallet with.

Who can do what. Owner and admin manage the wallet itself — who is in it, their roles, and which joint accounts exist. An editor records and edits transactions. A viewer sees everything and can export it, but changes nothing.
Everybody pays for themselves. Recording into a shared wallet needs your own active Pro. Without it you keep full access to look and to export — the wallet simply becomes read-only for you, and nothing is hidden from you or from anyone else.
Rows are signed. A transaction somebody else entered is marked with their name, so "who paid for this?" is answered on the row rather than from memory. Your own rows are not labelled — that would be noise.
Leaving takes your access, not the data. What you recorded stays in the wallet, because it describes money the group shared.
Export is free for everyone, always — including a viewer whose Pro has ended. One CSV carries the whole shared space: its holdings, its trades and its ledger, with an added by column.
Recurring transactions are personal only. A subscription repeats itself in your own ledger; in a shared wallet nothing is created automatically, because an automatic write into a place two people share should not depend on who opened the page first.
The calendar's events are the wallet's too. A dated line written on the shared wallet's calendar is seen by every member, notified to every member, and signed with its author's name; it never shows in anyone's personal ledger. A viewer sees the wallet's events and cannot change them.

10. Sample data & privacy

On a brand-new account the tracker is seeded with a small sample ledger so it isn't empty on day one and every chart has something to show. It's clearly labelled, and a single Clear sample button removes only the example rows — never anything you've added. Anonymous visitors see the same sample as a read-only demo. Sample rows never count toward the free transaction limit.

Your ledger is private to your account. Deleting a transaction is reversible — rows are hidden rather than erased immediately. Receipt photos are stored in a private bucket and shown only to you.

11. Free vs Pro

The tracker is genuinely useful for free, and every new account starts with 30 days of Pro.

Free includes the full dashboard, budgets, accounts, transfers, subscriptions, CSV import and CSV export — and up to 50 transactions (seeded sample rows don't count; deleting a transaction frees a slot). Existing data always stays visible after any limit is reached — only adding new transactions is gated.

Pro removes the transaction limit (unlimited) and unlocks the AI features: bank-statement PDF import, receipt scanning, AI weekly insights, and the premium PDF report — and it is what lets you create and write into a shared wallet (§9a). Being invited to one never costs anything: you can always look and export.

The Expenses Tracker is one of several trackers on CalculatorAI. Browse them all at calculatorai.app/trackers.