the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income.
you look at whether your bank account is growing or not.
then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.
only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.
you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.
if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.
i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses.
your app seems useful only after i have done that.
the workflow i am looking for is:
i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.
I'm not sure that level of detail (specifying receipts to the article level) helps you get a grasp of your overall spending, nor do I expect it giving the "right advice". Suppose you buy a lot of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, would you want that tool to suggest you reduce that spending?
the point is to group articles by category. a single visit to a supermarket may contain important and vanity items mixed together. i want to break that out and then categorize accordingly. i do want to know how much i am spending on candy or sugar drinks, or, if you are so inclined, cigarettes or alcohol. toys, gifts, school supplies are all different categories that are worth tracking. if you go shopping at places like target or walmart you'll get all of that mixed up on a single receipt.
fruits and vegetables don't need their own category. they could be grouped into food but candy bars or soda are not food.
i don't want the tool to suggest anything, but i want the numbers so i can draw my own conclusions.
entering data by article is easier than categorizing on the spot. i could just scan the receipt and let the tool work out the categories (once i assigned a category to an item, the tool can do it for any repeat appearance)
I suppose a tool like Beancount (or (h)ledger, but I only have experience with beancount) and bean-web would fulfill your needs. The latter offers HTML reports per arbitrary subaccount, based on the data entered in the beancount file (which is plain text).
then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.
only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.
you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.
if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.
i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses. your app seems useful only after i have done that.
the workflow i am looking for is:
i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.