A Small Business Expense Tracker That Takes 30 Seconds a Day

The best expense tracker is the one you're still using in November. That rules out most of them, because the ones with the richest features are also the ones that ask for the most per entry, and per-entry cost is what determines whether a habit survives past February.

The free Simple Expense Tracker is built to be boring in the right way: category, date, month, automatic totals, clear visuals, and nothing else to think about.

Simple beats thorough, because simple gets done

A tracker capturing 90% of your spending, used consistently for a year, is worth far more than a perfect one used for six weeks. Anyone who has abandoned two or three finance systems already should read that as a strong argument for starting with less, not more.

Log it in the moment

The habit that makes this work is entering an expense when it happens, on your phone, in under thirty seconds. Batching a month of receipts is a task large enough to be postponed, and postponed twice is abandoned. Thirty seconds is small enough that there's never a reason to defer it.

• Amount and category, chosen from a short fixed list.
• Date, which is today by default.
• A note only when the line item won't be self-explanatory in March.
• Nothing else. Resist adding fields for six months.

Six categories, not sixteen

Long category lists create a decision at the moment of entry, and a decision is friction. Six broad categories can be entered without thinking, and they still answer the question you're actually asking, which is where the money went at a level you can act on.

Every extra category is a small decision you'll make several times a week, forever.

What the monthly view is for

Once a month, look at the totals by category and ask one question: is anything meaningfully different from last month, and do I know why? That's the entire review. It takes three minutes and it catches the subscription that renewed at a higher rate, the supplier who quietly raised prices, and the category that's been drifting upward for a quarter.

Tax time is the payoff

Categorised, dated expenses across a whole year turn the annual accounts conversation from an excavation into an export. This is the moment when a year of thirty-second entries pays for itself, and it's a considerably better feeling than the alternative.

For a fuller version with more visual insights, see the Expense Tracker; to add the income side, the Income Tracker; for everything at once, the Business Finance dashboard. Duplicate the Simple Expense Tracker and log today's coffee.