How to log every expense yourself without it becoming a chore

Make each entry a tap instead of a form, fill a gap from a statement file instead of from memory, and when a balance stops matching the bank, let the app look for the missing entry instead of checking every line yourself. Hundo is built around that: it does not connect to banks, so every entry is one you add, and suggestions from your own history fill an entry in one tap.

Almost every budgeting app opens the same way. Pick your bank, type your online banking username and password, and wait while it pulls in the last ninety days.

A lot of people cannot take that step, and some will not. For them the question is not which app connects to their bank. It is which app makes entering things yourself quick enough to keep doing.

From the founder. The problems in this post are the ones I had myself. I would forget an entry, an account would stop matching the bank, and the only way to find what I had missed was to go through the transactions one by one. And every entry was a plain text form, so a handful of them took ten minutes. Now, when I open "add transaction", my Claude Max subscription is already there as a suggestion, and one tap fills every field. It does most of my typing for me.

Who ends up entering expenses by hand?#Link to this section

People whose country is not covered. Bank feeds are built on a handful of aggregators, and their maps are smaller than the marketing suggests. Plaid's own page advertises "over 95% bank coverage and localized support across 20 countries", under the page title "North America, UK, and Europe". YNAB publishes direct import for banks in the US, Canada, the UK and the EU. If you bank outside those maps, "connect your bank" will not find your bank. What to do when your country is not on the list covers that case on its own.

People whose bank is not covered, even though their country is. Smaller banks, credit unions and newer digital banks drop off these lists regularly.

People with money in more than one country. Even where each bank is supported, one app rarely connects to all of them at once, and the currency handling underneath is usually an afterthought.

People who would rather not share a banking login. Aggregators hold credentials or long-lived tokens for millions of people, and not every bank is happy about you sharing your login with a third party. Check your bank's terms before you decide.

Whichever of these is you, what decides whether you keep tracking is how long an entry takes.

How does Hundo make an entry take seconds?#Link to this section

By starting from what you already do. Most of what you spend repeats: the same subscriptions, the same bills, the same shops, often on the same day of the month.

A subscription on its usual day. Open "add transaction" and Hundo already shows the entries you are likely to make, ranked from your own history. A monthly bill that is due and not yet recorded is marked "Due today". One tap fills the name, the amount, the category, the budget and the account.

An amount you have paid before. Type the amount first, and Hundo offers the merchants you have paid amounts like it to, with the reason for each: the usual day, the usual amount, the last time. Pick one and the rest fills in. The ranking is arithmetic over your own entries, not a model, so it keeps up as you type.

A receipt in your hand. Photograph it, and the assistant reads it and drafts the entry for you to confirm.

A receipt in your inbox. Every account gets its own address at receipts.hundo.finance. Forward the confirmation from a shop or an airline and it arrives as a draft.

A sentence. Tell the assistant "spent 45 on groceries yesterday", or record a voice note, and confirm the draft. Nothing is recorded until you do.

A month at once. Download a statement from your bank, which it will let you do even when no app can connect to it, and import it as CSV, TSV or Excel. You map the columns once, and rows that look like ones already in your ledger are flagged, so an import plus a few typed lines gets you a complete month in minutes.

The suggestions, typing and file import are part of the free tracker. Photographs, forwarded email, voice notes and the assistant are part of Pro, because each one costs us a model call.

What happens when a balance stops matching the bank?#Link to this section

Sooner or later you forget an entry, and an account in the app no longer shows what the bank shows. Going through every line to find it is the job that makes people give up.

Subtract one balance from the other first: the size of the difference usually names what went wrong.

In Hundo Pro, you can send the assistant screenshots of your bank's recent transactions and ask it to find the entry that is missing. It can read your own entries to compare, and anything it drafts is recorded only when you confirm it.

For a longer gap, import the statement instead. The duplicate check means the days you did record are not counted twice.

How to keep tracking by hand after the novelty wears off covers the other ways the habit slips, and a fix for each.

What does entering everything yourself cost?#Link to this section

This part is real. Nothing fills the ledger in for you.

You type it, pick it, photograph it, forward it or import it. Suggestions make that smaller, and no amount of good design removes it.

So if your bank is supported, you trust the aggregator, and what you want is to open an app on Sunday and see the week already categorised with no effort from you, a bank-sync app is the right answer and you should go and get one. We say the same thing on our Mint page, and the honest list is there.

There is one thing the typing gives back, and some people value it. Entering an amount, even for a second, is the moment you notice what you spent. A feed that fills itself in is easy to stop reading.

The honest summary#Link to this section

If a bank feed works for you and you want it, use a sync app.

If you are entering your expenses yourself, the app's whole job is to make each entry quick and to keep the totals right. Your usual entries should be waiting when you open the form, a statement should import in one pass, and a balance that stops matching should not mean an evening of checking lines.

We built Hundo to do that: free forever, nothing capped, in 166 currencies, with an assistant you can ask about your own numbers if you want one.

Common questions#Link to this section

Can I use an expense tracker without linking my bank account?#Link to this section

Yes. Hundo does not connect to banks: you pick an entry from suggestions ranked out of your own history, type it, photograph the receipt, forward the email receipt, import a statement file, or ask the assistant and confirm its draft.

What is the risk of giving a budgeting app my bank login?#Link to this section

Aggregators hold credentials or long-lived tokens for millions of people, which makes them worth attacking, and not every bank is happy about you sharing your login with a third party. Hundo does not connect to banks, so it never asks for that login.

How do I find a missing transaction when my balance does not match the bank?#Link to this section

In Hundo Pro, send the assistant screenshots of your bank's recent transactions and ask it to find the entry that is missing; it can read your own entries to compare, and it records nothing until you confirm. For a longer gap, import the bank's statement file, and rows that look like ones you already have are flagged.

How do I get a full month of expenses in without bank sync?#Link to this section

Download a statement from your bank, which it will let you do even when no app can connect to it, and import it as CSV, TSV or Excel with column mapping and duplicate detection. An import plus a few typed lines gets you a complete month in minutes.

Which ways of adding expenses are free in Hundo?#Link to this section

The suggestions, typing and file import are part of the free tracker. Photographed receipts, forwarded email receipts, voice notes and the assistant are part of Pro, because each one costs a model call.