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How to track your spending

Gather a month or two of bank and card statements, give every purchase a category, and add up each one, in a notebook, a spreadsheet or Simple Balance.

7 min readUpdated

Most people have a rough idea of what they spend each month. Tracking your spending means checking that guess against what really happened. It’s the first step for almost anything else you want to do with your money, from making a budget to saving for a trip. To track your spending, gather a month or two of bank and card statements, give every purchase a category, and add up what each category cost.

Why it matters

It’s hard to change something you can’t see. “Spend less” is a wish. “Spend $150 less on eating out” is a plan, and you can only make it once you know eating out cost you $450 last month.

Small costs are the easiest to miss. Nobody forgets the rent, but coffee, delivery fees and the app you tried for free slip by and add up. In a 2022 survey by C+R Research, people first guessed they spent $86 a month on subscriptions. When they were asked about each kind one at a time, the total came to $219.

Real numbers also make a better budget. Say you set $300 for groceries because it sounded about right, but you really spend $500. That budget is broken by the second week, and it’s easy to give up on it. A budget built on two months of real spending starts out believable.

Tracking also tells you whether you’re getting ahead. Take what came in, subtract what went out, and you’ll know if your savings grew or shrank. You need both numbers to know that.

How to do it

You don’t need special software. A notebook or a spreadsheet is fine, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a free spending tracker you can print. What matters most is doing the same few steps each time.

1. Gather a month or two of statements

Start with your checking account and each credit card. Most banks let you download statements from their website, often as a spreadsheet file. One full month is enough to start. Two or three is better, because a single month usually has something odd in it, like a birthday or a car repair.

2. Pick a short list of categories

A category is a label for what the money was for, like groceries or rent. Start with eight or ten:

  • Housing (rent or mortgage)
  • Utilities (power, water, phone, internet)
  • Groceries
  • Eating out
  • Transportation (gas, bus fare, car payment)
  • Health
  • Shopping
  • Subscriptions
  • Everything else

You can split one up later if it’s hiding something. Start with too many and every receipt turns into a puzzle. A list of budget categories has more ideas.

3. Give every purchase a category

Go down each statement and label every purchase. Two kinds of entries are easy to get wrong, so keep an eye out for them.

The first is money moving between your own accounts. Paying your credit card from checking doesn’t change what you spent, because the spending happened when you used the card. If you count the card payment as well, you’ve counted those groceries twice. Moving money into savings works the same way.

Checking and a credit card sit inside a dashed line marked Your accounts, and a store sits outside it. An arrow marked $80, Spending, goes from the credit card out to the store. An arrow marked $80, Transfer, goes from checking to the credit card and stays inside the line. Counted as spending: $80, not $160.Your accountsCheckingCredit cardStore$80Spending$80TransferCounted as spending$80, not $160
An example: money leaves your accounts once, at the store. Paying the card from checking is a transfer, so the $80 counts once, not twice.

The second is refunds. If you return $40 of clothes, you spent $40 less on clothes. That money is coming back, not money you earned, so take it off the clothes category.

4. Add it up

Total each category for the month, then total what came in. Now you can see where most of your money went, which numbers surprised you, and whether you spent more than you earned.

Six rows from your statements, each with its category. Grocery store, $80, Groceries. Pizza place, $35, Eating out. Clothing store, $60, Clothes. Card payment, $200, not spending. Grocery store, $45, Groceries. Clothes refund, plus $40, Clothes. Below them, the month’s totals as bars: Groceries $125, made of $80 and $45. Eating out $35. Clothes $60 minus the $40 refund, which is $20. The card payment isn’t in any total.Your statementsCategoryGrocery store$80GroceriesPizza place$35Eating outClothing store$60ClothesCard payment$200Not spendingGrocery store$45GroceriesClothes refund+$40ClothesTotals for the monthGroceries$125Eating out$35Clothes$60 − $40 = $20
An example month: every row gets a category, then each category is added up. The card payment isn’t spending, and the refund comes off Clothes.

5. Keep it going

Doing this once gives you a snapshot. Doing it every week, for ten or fifteen minutes, gives you a habit you can use. Weekly is easier than monthly because you can still remember what most of the charges were.

How to do it in Simple Balance

Simple Balance is an expense tracker: it keeps your accounts, purchases and categories in one place and does the adding up for you. It doesn’t pull anything from your bank today. You download the file your bank gives you and bring it in, or type in a purchase yourself.

Set up your accounts

Open Accounts and press New account. Add your checking account and each credit card, with what each one holds today as the opening balance. For a credit card, type what you owe as a plain number and leave Starting balance type on Amount owed.

The accounts page: a search box and sort controls, then accounts grouped by type. Under Checking, a euro account at €1,621.10 and Everyday Checking at $7,663.45. Under Savings, Savings at $20,200.00. Under Credit card, a card named Travel Card.

The money in this picture is made up. It’s the real product, filled with example spending.

Bring in a statement

  1. Download your statement from your bank’s website as a CSV file, a simple spreadsheet file that many banks offer.
  2. Open Import CSV, choose the file, and pick the account it belongs to.
  3. Check which column is the date, which is the payee and which is the amount. Check the date order too. Many US banks put the month first, so 03/04/2026 means March 4.
  4. Press Dry run to see how each row will be read. Nothing is saved yet.
  5. Press Stage all rows.
The import screen before a file is picked: a step headed Choose a CSV file, an empty drop target reading Drop in a file or browse, and a preview panel saying no file has been chosen yet.

The money in this picture is made up. It’s the real product, filled with example spending.

The rows go to Staged, a waiting area where nothing counts toward your balances yet. If something looks wrong, you can fix it or delete it there, and no harm is done. Importing a statement has more detail.

Sort the rows as you check them

On Staged, click a row’s category to set it. If you type a name that doesn’t exist yet, Simple Balance creates it. Rows that look like something you already have get flagged as possible duplicates, so bringing in the same statement twice won’t double your spending. When everything looks right, press Commit selected.

Staged transactions, the review queue: four rows that don't count yet, each with a date, payee, account, category, a Ready status and an amount, including a $19.99 refund from Streamly and a $23.50 transit pass on the travel card.

The money in this picture is made up. It’s the real product, filled with example spending.

Card payments and refunds

When you pay your card from checking, record it as a Transfer, not a withdrawal. A transfer moves money between two of your own accounts, so it never counts as spending. On Transactions, a transfer shows both accounts and no category, like the $600 moved into savings below.

For a refund, choose Deposit and give it the same category as the purchase. That category’s spending goes down by the amount of the refund. If the category is new, the form asks what kind of money it is. Pick A refund of money you spent.

A list of transactions, newest first, each with who it was with, which account it was in, its category and its amount, all in dollars. Most are spending on groceries, a lunch, cinema tickets and a transit pass. One is a $750 freelance payment coming in, and one is $600 moved from checking to savings, which shows both accounts and no category.

The money in this picture is made up. It’s the real product, filled with example spending.

See where it went

Overview shows your spending by category for any dates you choose, biggest first. Transfers are left out, so a card payment never shows up as spending.

The Simple Balance overview for one month: a dollar total with balance, deposits, withdrawals and net cash flow across the top, then a checking account, a savings account and a credit card with their balances, beside spending by category as bars from rent down to subscriptions.

The money in this picture is made up. It’s the real product, filled with example spending.

Reports goes into more detail. The Categories report breaks spending down by category, and Income and expenses compares what came in with what went out. If one big category like rent makes the rest hard to see on the chart, open its row’s menu and choose Exclude from this view. That only changes what you’re looking at, not your records.

If you find the same store filed under the wrong category for months, go to Transactions, check those rows, and change their category all at once.

Once you have a month or two of real numbers, you’re ready to make your first budget.

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