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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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 stop or delete a whole series. Due occurrences are created automatically when you open the tracker, so the ledger stays current without manual re-entry. The Subscription Audit calculator can push a reviewed list of subscriptions into the tracker as recurring transactions in one step.

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.

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.

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