Tracking Money

When you create a new tracked category, you typically specify the type of the counter to be used e.g. a number with two decimal places and give it a name. There are Advanced Settings in the New Category screen, which allow you to designate a tracked category as having “Correlated Values”. This controls whether your daily entries carry over from day to day. This comes really handy when tracking your budget. Here’s how you can configure Daily Tracker to track multiple budget categories:

1. Create a folder “Monthly Budget” that will contain your budget categories.

2. Inside that folder, create a new category for each of your spending categories e.g. Dinning out, Groceries, Automobile and so forth. Choose a Number, two decimal places as the counter type and enter $ (or your local currency symbol) in the Units field. Tap the Advanced Settings and turn Correlated Values ON.

At this point you are ready to track your budget. To set a starting budget for a given category (e.g. Dining Out), navigate to the Day view, tap the value field and set your budget, say $300. This is the value you will be subtracting from going forward. When you navigate to the Month view, you will see your daily spending and the remaining balance. To reset your budget, simply tap on the value field again and enter the new starting value. You can do it at any time depending on whether you want to track your budget on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis.

Notice that when you navigate to the Budget folder, there is a Summary button at the bottom right corner. This allows you to see graphs of your spending for all the categories. In addition, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see the sum of all your spendings for the current month.

How is this feature meant to be used in practice given that you probably have lots of expenses on your credit card? Daily Tracker is not meant to replace desktop software (e.g. Quicken or Microsoft Money) which connect to your bank and automatically classify your expenses. Instead, Daily Tracker is meant to allow you to track the “problem” areas. For example, say that you find yourself spending too much money dining out. Start tracking just that. This way, you minimize the amount of manual data entry, but still benefit of having this constant reminder anywhere you go.

Follow the steps above to create your budget categories from scratch or use the sample Monthly Budget Category Template that you can just import to your Daily Tracker.