Why I track my expenses manually in 2026

What I tried, and where it lost me

The bank-linked apps were the obvious answer. Connect once, sit back, watch the dashboard fill in. But the banks I use don't officially support any of them, so the only route was a third-party scraper, and I wasn't going to hand my login over for something this small. And cash is still part of normal life in plenty of places. None of that shows up in a bank feed anyway.

The other manual apps lost me in a different way. They asked for too much per entry. Five fields for a coffee. Within a couple of weeks, opening the app would start to feel like a small daily chore, and I'd quietly stop.

What worked

The thing that finally stuck was making the entry itself absurdly fast. Not “fast enough.” Fast enough that I'd reach for the app before I'd even considered whether I had time. I could scan a QR at a stall or a café, hit pay, and have the entry logged before the payment completed. Nothing about that felt like effort, so I kept doing it.

That one constraint ended up shaping everything else. No bank login. No required fields beyond the amount. Categories and notes optional. A layout that doesn't ask you to think.

The rest of the app grew around how I was using it day to day.

I wanted to keep a trip separate from my normal spending, so I added groups. One for daily life, one for travel, one for side work, one for whatever else.

I wanted to log café prices in baht or yen without doing arithmetic in my head, so multi-currency came in. Your own exchange rate, log in the local currency, see both the local amount and your home currency total.

I kept losing track of which subscriptions I was still paying for, so they got their own place in the app instead of sitting mixed in with everything else.

I noticed I was checking the day's total far more often than I was logging new entries, so today's number ended up on home and lock screen widgets.

I wanted in-store Apple Pay taps to log themselves, and through a Shortcuts automation called Apple Pay capture, they do. Each tap becomes a transaction entry, with categories suggested from past entries at the same merchant. Most of the time, logging turns into either nothing at all, or a quick tap to pick a category.