How to keep tracking expenses by hand after the novelty wears off

Tracking expenses by hand usually stops in one of four ways - you forget, the upkeep gets too heavy, you skip entries, or you pause and never restart - so fix each one on purpose. Log at the moment you pay, track less detail than you think you need, fill a gap from a statement instead of from memory, and decide in advance how you will restart.

Is tracking by hand bound to fail?#Link to this section

No. The research is more encouraging than the folklore.

In a 2015 study, Daniel Epstein and colleagues at the University of Washington surveyed 105 physical activity trackers, 99 finance trackers and 83 location trackers, past and present, and interviewed 22 of them.

• Finance trackers stayed longer. 26% of them had abandoned a finance tool within three months, against 45% for location tools and 44% for physical activity tools.
• Most of them typed. 63% of the finance trackers were using spreadsheets, "which require substantial manual entry".
• Many kept going for years. 45% had used their current finance tool for at least two years.

In a 2014 interview study of 14 people in the San Francisco Bay Area, Joseph Kaye and colleagues found that nobody was a regular user of an aggregation tool such as Mint or Quicken. Two people had used Mint and given it up: one over security fears and the inconvenience of adding accounts, the other out of frustration with its automatic categorisation.

These are small studies, of people in one country, so read them as a description and not a law. What they describe is that tracking by hand can last, and that when it stops, it stops in ways you can recognise.

Why does manual tracking stop?#Link to this section

Epstein's study names four kinds of lapse: "forgetting to track, difficulty managing upkeep, intentionally skipping entries, and suspending tracking".

One finance participant, who tracked in a spreadsheet, described the upkeep problem exactly: "we just kind of stopped updating it because it was too much work to keep up to date".

Each kind of lapse has a different fix, so it helps to know which one is yours.

How do you stop forgetting?#Link to this section

Log at the moment you pay, not at the end of the day. The receipt is in your hand and the amount is on the screen. By evening you are rebuilding the day from memory, and rebuilding is the step that gets skipped.

Keep the app one tap away. Hundo is a web app you can add to your phone's home screen, where it opens in its own window like any other app.

Make each entry short. In Hundo you type the amount first, and it offers the merchants and categories you have used with amounts like it before, ranked from your own history. One tap fills in the rest. The ranking is arithmetic over your own entries, not a model, so it works as fast as you type and gets better as your history grows.

How do you keep the upkeep light?#Link to this section

Track less than you think you need.

• Use few categories. Ten broad categories you actually use are worth more than forty precise ones that make you stop and think. You can split one later, once you know you want the detail.
• Budget only where you want a limit. A Hundo budget is a monthly or weekly limit, and it can fill itself in from the categories you choose, so once it is set it needs no upkeep of its own.
• Aim for a glance, not an audit. In the Kaye study, 8 of the 14 people checked their bank balance daily or several times a week, and the researchers describe people's sense of their finances as coming from "occasional glimpses at the complex whole". A ledger that gives you that glance in a few seconds is doing its job.

Is it fine to skip entries?#Link to this section

Yes, if you skip on purpose.

Decide in advance what does not get its own line. One rule that works: record a cash withdrawal as one entry, instead of each coffee it paid for.

What hurts is skipping by accident and then deciding the whole record is ruined. A ledger with a few gaps still tells you where most of the money went.

What if you have already stopped?#Link to this section

Do not type the gap back in from memory. Import it.

If your bank lets you download a statement as a file, bring in the missing weeks that way. Hundo imports CSV, TSV and Excel files: you map the columns once, and it flags rows that look like ones already in your ledger, so the days you did type do not end up counted twice.

Then carry on from today, not from where you stopped.

Epstein's paper names "designing to resume tracking after a lapse" as an open problem for the tools themselves. So plan your own restart before you need one:

• For a trip or a holiday, decide in advance whether you track it as you go or pause and import the statement when you are home. Pausing on purpose is the fourth kind of lapse, and it is only a problem when there is no plan to restart.
• For a busy month, keep logging only the large expenses, and import the rest later.

When should you stop typing everything yourself?#Link to this section

When the typing is the problem, not the habit.

Hundo Pro adds ways to get an entry in without the form: photograph a receipt, forward an email receipt to your own address, record a voice note, or tell the assistant "spent 45 on groceries yesterday". Each one arrives as a draft, and nothing is recorded until you confirm it.

Typing and file import stay part of the free tracker, with nothing capped. An expense tracker that never asks for a bank login covers what you give up and what you get back by not connecting a bank at all.

Common questions#Link to this section

Is it better to track expenses by hand or to connect a bank?#Link to this section

Where a bank feed works for you, it is less typing. Tracking by hand works in any country, keeps your bank password to yourself, and makes you look at every amount. If no app can connect to your bank, what to do when no budgeting app supports your country sets out the options.

What if you miss a week?#Link to this section

Import that week from your statement if you can. If you cannot, add one estimated entry for each category you spent in, and carry on from today.

How many categories should you start with?#Link to this section

Few enough that you never stop to decide which one an expense belongs to. It is easier to split a category later than to merge a dozen you no longer use.

Can you track cash by hand?#Link to this section

Yes. Choose one rule and keep it: record each cash purchase, or record each withdrawal as one entry. In Hundo, cash can be its own account, so the money in your wallet counts in your net worth like any other balance.