How to use it

Everything the app does, in the order you will need it. No technical knowledge assumed — if a step needs a click, the click is written down.

What this is

One file. You open it in a browser and it is the whole system — nothing to install, no account to create, no internet needed. Everything you type is saved in that browser on that device, straight away.

There are two files in the download:

The first five minutes

1. Open Daily-Spend-Desktop.html. It opens in whatever browser you normally use.
2. Go to Settings → Data and press Load 6 months of sample data. Now there is something to look at, and nothing you press can do any harm.
3. Click around. Ledger, Dashboard, Settings. Change a budget and watch the colours move.
4. When you have seen enough, Settings → Data → Delete every expense. Your categories and budgets stay; the invented figures go.
5. Now go to Settings → Categories and make the list look like your life. Rename them, change the colours, delete what you do not need, add what you do.
6. Settings → Budgets, and put a monthly figure against each one. Guess. You will correct it in a month, and there is a button that does it for you once you have some history.

Adding an expense

On a computer, the row under 01 Add an expense: date, amount, category, how you paid, and a note. Press Enter and it files. The date stays where it was, so entering six receipts from Saturday is six quick presses rather than six trips back to the date box.

On a phone, tap the + in the middle of the bottom bar. A sheet comes up with a proper number pad, category chips and payment chips.

Shorthand

The amount box understands a few things so you type less:

Figures are shown grouped the Indian way — 1,31,000, not 131000 — so a lakh reads as a lakh. If you would rather see 131,000, that is one setting in Settings → General.

Changing or removing one

Hover the row in the Expenses list and a pencil and a bin appear on the right. On a phone, tap the row.

What the colours mean

Every category is scored against its own budget, and so is the month as a whole.

Both thresholds are yours to set in Settings → Scoring. A category with no budget is still tracked; it simply never scores.

Pace

The top of the screen also tells you how far ahead or behind an even pace you are. That is your budget spread evenly across the days of the month. Real spending is never even — rent lands on the first — so treat it as a direction rather than a verdict. It is most useful in the middle of the month, which is exactly when there is still time to do something.

The pencil on every card

Hover over any card and a small ✎ appears in its corner. It opens the exact setting that card is driven by, rather than leaving you to hunt through the tabs.

On a phone the pencils are always visible, since there is nothing to hover with.

Putting it on your phone

The downloaded file works on a phone, but a file sitting in your Downloads folder cannot be added to the home screen and does not keep its data reliably. For a phone, open the web copy instead:

auditlogin.com/spend/mobile/

• iPhone: open it in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It has to be Safari — Chrome on iOS cannot do this.
• Android: open it in Chrome, then either accept the install prompt at the bottom, or the three-dot menu → Install app.

Once it is on the home screen it opens full screen with its own icon, and it works with no signal.

Getting it out

The spreadsheet and image buttons need the internet the first time, because they use two small libraries that load from the web. Everything else works offline.

Backing it up — please read this one

Settings → Backup & data → Write a backup file. That writes a single .json file with every expense, category, budget and setting in it. Keep it somewhere that is not that device — email it to yourself, put it in a cloud folder, anything at all.

Restoring is the same screen. It replaces what is there now, and it reads a backup written by either the desktop or the phone edition, so it is also how you move your book from one to the other.

Settings, section by section

When something looks wrong

If you outgrow it

The free edition is the whole expense book and it stays free. What it does not do is the part that needs a server: your phone and laptop agreeing with each other, receipt photographs, recurring expenses posting themselves, and an alert before a category goes over. That is the cloud version — auditlogin.com/spend/cloud.html — and your backup file imports straight into it, so nothing you record now is wasted.