记账工具

What an expense tracker does that a budget planner doesn't

A budget planner is forward-looking: it compares planned income against planned costs for a period. An expense tracker is backward-looking and granular — it records each individual transaction as it happens, with a date, amount, category, and note, then lets you slice that history by date range, see where the money actually went, watch a month-by-month trend, and check your real spending against category budgets. In short, a budget is the plan; this is the running log of reality, and the gap between the two is where the insight lives.

The four views

Each transaction is tagged with one of eight categories — Food, Transport, Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Bills, Education, Other — each with its own colour that carries consistently through every view, so a glance at the trend chart tells you whether a heavy month was driven by Bills (red) or Shopping (pink).

How the numbers are computed

The headline total is just the sum of every visible expense's amount; the date filter narrows what "visible" means by keeping only transactions on or between your chosen start and end dates. The Summary tab adds amounts per category and, where you've set a budget, draws a bar showing spent ÷ budget × 100 — turning amber at 80% and red at 100% so you see an overrun coming. The Monthly Trend groups by the year-month part of each date, scales every month's bar relative to your highest-spending month, and segments each bar by category so the composition is visible, not just the height.

A worked example

Say in one month you log Food $300, Transport $80, and Shopping $260, and you set a Food budget of $300 and a Shopping budget of $200. The Summary shows Food at 300 ÷ 300 = 100% — a full red bar warning you've hit the limit exactly — and Shopping at 260 ÷ 200 = 130%, capped visually at a red full bar with the text "$260.00 of $200.00 budget (130%)". The grand total reads $640. Next month the Trend tab places this month's bar next to others, and because Shopping was unusually high its pink segment visibly dominates that bar.

Use cases

• Finding leaks. Categorised history reveals the small, frequent purchases that quietly add up — the daily coffee, the impulse apps.
• Sticking to limits. The colour-coded budget bars give an early warning before a category blows past its cap.
• Spotting seasonality. The monthly trend exposes patterns — higher Bills in winter, more Entertainment in summer — that a single month hides.
• Tax and reimbursement prep. Filter to a date range and Export CSV to hand clean records to an accountant or expense system.

Tips and common mistakes

• Log promptly. The tool pre-fills today's date and is fastest when you add an expense the moment it happens; reconstructing a week from memory loses the small items that matter most.
• Categorise deliberately. Dumping everything into "Other" defeats the Summary and Trend views. Assign a real category so the colour breakdown means something.
• Set budgets that reflect reality. Base each category limit on your own past months from the Trend tab, not an aspirational guess, or the bars will always be red and you'll start ignoring them.
• Export regularly. Your data lives in this browser's local storage, not on a server — private and persistent on this device, but invisible on another and lost if you clear site data. The CSV export is your portable backup.

Everything stays on your device: expenses and budgets are saved only in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded, so your financial detail remains private.