What this tracker does
Type in an expense, pick a category, and it lands in the list with a running total. Each entry takes four things: the date, a category, a short description, and the dollar amount. The tracker adds everything up as you go and breaks the total down by category, so you can see at a glance that food ate 40% of last week’s spending.
It’s not a budgeting app with bank logins and projections. It’s a fast scratchpad for spending. Jot down what you spent, watch the totals move, and pull a CSV when you need the data somewhere else.
How to use it
Fill in the four fields at the top and hit Add expense. The new entry shows up at the top of the list, the total spent box updates, and the by-category bars redraw. Pressing Enter in the description or amount field adds the row too, so you can rattle off a handful of expenses without touching your mouse.
Got a typo? Hover any row and click the X on the right to delete it. The totals recalculate instantly. There’s no edit-in-place, so if an amount is wrong, delete the row and re-add it. Quick, but worth knowing.
The date defaults to today. Change it when you’re back-filling receipts from earlier in the week. Categories cover the usual suspects: food, transport, housing, utilities, health, entertainment, shopping, travel, and a catch-all “Other” for the weird stuff.
Where your data lives
Everything stays in your browser. The tracker writes to localStorage, which means your entries survive a page refresh, a closed tab, even a reboot. Come back tomorrow and your list is still there. Nothing gets uploaded, and there’s no account to make.
A couple of catches to keep in mind. Private or incognito windows usually wipe localStorage when you close them, so don’t track a month of spending in an incognito tab. Clearing your browser’s site data deletes the list too. And because the data is tied to one browser on one device, your phone won’t see what you logged on your laptop. That’s the trade-off for an app with zero servers.
Export to CSV
When you want the numbers somewhere serious, hit Export CSV. You get a plain comma-separated file with date, category, description, and amount columns, sorted newest first, with a total row at the bottom. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or feed it to a script. The file name includes today’s date so successive exports don’t overwrite each other.
The CSV escapes commas and quotes properly, so a description like Lunch, two people won’t split into the wrong columns. Small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that breaks a lot of hand-rolled exporters.
Questions people ask
Does this connect to my bank? Nope. It’s a manual tracker. You type expenses in yourself. No Plaid, no login, no transaction sync. That’s intentional. Nothing about your spending leaves the browser.
Will I lose my entries if I close the tab? No, as long as you’re in a normal browser window. The list is saved to localStorage and reloads automatically. Incognito mode is the exception. It typically clears storage on close.
Can I track expenses in euros or another currency? The amounts are just numbers, so type whatever you like. The dollar sign in front is cosmetic. The math works the same in any currency. Just stay consistent so your totals mean something.
What happens to the sample expenses already in the list? They’re there so you can see the layout right away. Delete them with the X button whenever you’re ready to log your own, or hit Clear all to start from a blank slate.
Can I get my data onto another device? Export a CSV and open it wherever you need. There’s no built-in sync between devices, since the tracker has no backend. The CSV is your portable copy.