Free Budget Tracker: Log Expenses, Set Budgets, Import CSV

Track income and expenses by category and month, compare against budgets, and export CSV — all stored in your browser.

Log income and spending by category, set a monthly budget for each, and see at a glance how the month is going: what came in, what went out, what is left, and which categories are over. Recurring entries fill themselves in every week, month or year, a twelve-month chart shows the trend, and everything is stored in your browser with CSV in and out for spreadsheets.

How to set up your budget

  1. Choose your currency from the Currency menu next to the month selector; a new budget starts in EUR and 24 ISO currencies are listed.
  2. Open Manage categories to rename the starter categories, add income or expense categories, and type a monthly budget for each expense category.
  3. Add your regular items in the top row of the Entries table — date, category, amount and note — and set Repeat to Weekly, Monthly or Yearly for salary, rent and subscriptions so they appear in every month.
  4. Import a CSV of transactions downloaded from your bank's website, pick the decimal separator, check the preview and press Import.
  5. Review the month: the Income, Expenses and Net cards, the category bars that turn red when a budget is exceeded, and the Last 12 months chart; export a JSON backup now and then.

Categories and budgets

A new budget starts with eight sensible categories: two for income and six for the usual expense buckets such as housing, groceries, transport and savings, each with its own colour. Rename them, add your own, or give any expense category a monthly budget; the category bars then show spend against that budget and turn red the moment it is exceeded. Deleting a category with entries does not lose the entries, they move to an uncategorised bucket you can reassign later.

Amounts are stored in minor units, so a euro budget of 250.00 is kept as 25000 cents and arithmetic is exact; the display formats it with your locale's currency rules for whichever ISO currency you pick.

Budget rules of thumb by category

No bank login required

Many budgeting apps ask for your online-banking credentials so an aggregator can pull transactions automatically. This tracker never connects to a bank: you type entries yourself or import the CSV file your bank already lets you download, and the file is read by the page on your device.

That trade costs a minute of manual work each month, but no third party ever holds a login to your accounts or a copy of your spending history, and nothing breaks when a bank changes its connection rules.

Zero-based, 50/30/20 or envelope budgeting

Zero-based budgeting gives every unit of income a job. Here that means setting category budgets, including savings, until they add up to your expected income, then aiming for a Net card near zero at the end of the month because the surplus has already been assigned.

For the 50/30/20 split, group categories into needs such as housing, groceries, utilities and transport, wants such as leisure, and savings, then size each group's budgets to 50%, 30% and 20% of take-home pay. Envelope budgeting maps onto each category's budget as the envelope: the bar shows how much of it is spent, the label shows the budget, and a red bar with an over-by amount is an envelope that has run dry.

Entries, months and recurring items

The month selector moves one month at a time and every panel follows it: the three summary cards, the category bars, the entries table and the chart. Adding an entry is a single row at the top of the table with today's date pre-filled; edits happen in place. Mark an entry as recurring weekly, monthly or yearly and the tool expands it into each future month automatically, clamping a 31st to the last day of shorter months so a rent entry dated the 31st still appears in February.

Importing bank exports

Most banks let you download transactions as CSV, and the import dialog is built for that: it detects a header row when present and falls back to the export column order when not. Dates are read as ISO (YYYY-MM-DD), or as day-first or month-first when one of the two numbers is above 12; an ambiguous date such as 03/04/2026 is reported as unreadable rather than guessed. Amounts have currency symbols and spaces stripped, and you choose whether the decimal separator is a point or a comma so a European 1.234,56 is read correctly. Unknown category names are created as expense categories on the fly and a preview shows the first rows before anything is added.

Trend chart and exports

The chart plots income and expenses per month for the last twelve months on a small, fast canvas graph that resizes with the window and re-themes when you switch dark mode. The CSV export writes date, category, kind, amount and note with proper quoting so it round-trips through spreadsheets; the JSON export is a complete backup of categories, budgets and entries.

Where the data lives

There is no account. The budget you are editing is kept as a draft in your browser's local database and restored on the next visit; Save as keeps named budgets side by side, for example one per household or per project. Because the data never leaves the device, clearing site data deletes it, so export a CSV or JSON copy now and then.

Questions people ask about Budget & Expense Tracker

Do I need to link my bank account?
No, and there is no way to. You enter transactions by hand or import the CSV file your bank's website lets you download, and the tracker reads that file inside your browser. No banking login, aggregator or server ever sees your transactions.
Can I use the budget tracker on my phone?
It is a web page, so it opens in a modern mobile browser without an app. Each browser keeps its own copy of the data, though, so a budget started on your laptop will not appear on your phone; move it by exporting JSON on one device and importing that file on the other.
How much of my income should go to housing?
A widely quoted guideline is about 30% of gross monthly income for rent or mortgage payments, though in expensive cities many households spend more. The tracker does not enforce any rule; type the amount you can afford as the Housing budget and the bar shows how close you get each month.
Can I track more than one currency?
Each budget has one currency, chosen at the top of the page and used for every amount in it. If you handle two currencies, keep two saved budgets and switch between them from the Open menu.
How are recurring entries stored?
As a single entry with a repeat rule. The tool generates the occurrences for whichever month you are viewing rather than writing copies, so editing the original updates every future month at once.
What happens on import if a category does not exist?
The importer creates it as an expense category with a new colour and assigns the rows to it. You can rename or merge it afterwards in the categories panel without losing the entries.
Why do amounts sometimes show a different number of decimals?
Formatting follows the currency: of the 24 currencies in the menu, the Japanese yen and Korean won have no minor unit and display whole numbers, while every other one shows two decimals. The underlying value is always stored exactly as an integer in minor units.
Is my financial data private?
Yes. Nothing is transmitted; the page has no backend and no analytics on your entries. Data is written only to your browser's IndexedDB storage on this device.

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Content reviewed 2026-09-27.