Expense Tracker

svorsk

Does anybody have a smooth Expense Tracker system they would like to share? Preferably something that automates the running tally?

tr4jan

svorsk I'm almost certain that there are already forevernotes users who also do such things as recording at least some expenses in notes. I would not understand this, as mathematical operators in the notes currently only work in an extremely rudimentary way in direct addition. Not in cells and not if you write any text between the summands, for example.

I want to manage and use financial figures (including expenses) so that they are not just "dead numbers", which is why I of course don't use notes for this purpose.

Looking at the forum, I'm sure someone has thought about your intent as well, like @tvillemw and/ or created a shortcut for rudimentary addition purposes. I would be curious to hear about it.

tvillemw

If you are looking for a system that works inside of Notes, that's a tall order. There's a guy on YouTube (New Perspectives) who made a shortcut that sort of does this. If memory serves it tracks only round numbers, no cents, to give you an at-a-glance idea of what you're spending. Coincidentally, I downloaded and deleted his shortcut a couple days ago.

Personally I think this is asking too much of Notes. You're better off using a spreadsheet or a purpose-built app for running totals and calculations. Having said this, I record all my expenses in Notes (I have 35 years of data backed up to one big text file). I record the data in consistently defined columns (Date, Category, Amount, Vendor) so I can select the text, copy it, and paste into a spreadsheet or load into a money tracking app. I don't do a lot of calculation, I search the data for answers such as where, when, how much did I pay for something. For fun I loaded all the Apple entries into a spreadsheet - shockingly large amount, I was depressed for weeks!

tvillemw

I have a shortcut that uses the dictionary feature to put up a menu of the vendors I use the most. The shortcut formats today's date, supplies the category, a zero amount, and the vendor's name. It assembles an expense record and puts it into the clipboard (e.g., 2025/02/13: MEDM 0.00 Cape Pharmacy.) All I have to do is paste the record into my note and enter the amount. I have another menu with monthly expenses with repeating amounts filled in.

I keep the Shortcuts app in Slide Over mode so the menus are always available. I created these menus years ago before I was using Notes for collection. The column format works well with Numbers and CSV apps.

tr4jan

With this suggestion, I have found several shortcuts for expenses that are spread across the web. In cases where a shortcut queries the parameters of an expense and automatically transfers them to an Excel/Numbers file, this also makes sense to me - as opposed to shortcuts that only keep captured expenses in Notes. The most promising one (10 minutes of search) was this one. You may give it a try, @svorsk .