How to start tracking your spending and not quit after a week

2026-08-106 min read

Almost everyone has tried at some point to write down where their money goes. Almost everyone has quit. The spreadsheet looks beautiful the first week, with colours and formulas, and by day twelve it has three days unfilled and never gets opened again.

The reason is almost never a lack of willpower. It's that the system asked for too much.

The three mistakes of a first attempt

Too many categories

You start with twenty-five: supermarket, corner shop, greengrocer, butcher, delivery, restaurant, coffee. It sounds tidy, and in practice it means every expense demands a decision — sometimes a decision with no clear answer. That sandwich you bought at the supermarket and ate on the street: is it groceries or eating out?

That two-second hesitation, repeated ten times a day, is what makes tracking feel heavy. Start with six or seven broad categories. You can split them later, once you know which ones actually matter to you; guessing up front is impossible.

Trying to record the past

The urge to reconstruct the last three months of statements to "have a baseline" is what makes many people quit before they start. It's hours of boring work for data you won't use.

Start today, going forward. In thirty days you'll have a real month, which is worth more than three months rebuilt from memory.

Chasing precision to the cent

If you spend fifteen minutes trying to remember whether the coffee was 3.50 or 3.80, the system is making you lose time on what matters least. A 2% error changes no decision. Round it and move on.

How to build it so it lasts

One moment a day

Logging each expense the instant it happens sounds ideal and doesn't hold up: nobody pulls out their phone at the supermarket checkout. What does work is a fixed moment — at night, two minutes, every expense from the day.

If you attach it to something you already do without fail (after dinner, before setting your alarm), it stops depending on remembering.

Start with six categories

A base that works for almost anyone:

Home: rent or building fees, utilities, internet.
Food: groceries and eating out, all together at first.
Transport: fuel, transit card, taxis.
Health: insurance, pharmacy, appointments.
Leisure: going out, subscriptions, gifts.
Other: anything that didn't fit above.

If "Other" comes out huge at the end of the month, that's when you split it. That's the signal you need a new category; before you have the data, it's guesswork.

Record three fields, not eight

Date, amount and category. That's enough to answer the questions that matter. Merchant, payment method and a detailed description are fields you fill in for two weeks and leave empty afterwards — better not to have them.

What to do with your first month

The first month isn't for changing anything. It's for finding out. Almost everyone gets the same surprise: it isn't the big expense that throws things off, it's the small repeated ones. Four coffees a week at 3.50 is 56 a month, which is more than plenty of subscriptions people cancel out of guilt.

Only with the second month can you compare and see a trend. If you start drawing conclusions after ten days, you'll be drawing conclusions from noise.

When to move from a spreadsheet to an app

A spreadsheet is a good starting point, and for many people it's enough. It falls short in three specific situations:

When you share expenses with someone. Two people editing the same spreadsheet from their phones is awkward: changes get overwritten and nobody knows which version is right. We wrote about that in how to split expenses as a couple.
When instalments show up. Projecting by hand which month each instalment lands in is exactly the kind of maintenance that makes people abandon a spreadsheet. We go into it in how to keep your credit card instalments under control.
When logging becomes a chore. If recording from your phone is painful, you'll stop recording. It's the number one cause of quitting.

Expenses covers those three cases: it installs from the browser, works offline, keeps shared expenses in one list you both see and projects instalments. It's free and it doesn't ask for your bank credentials — you enter expenses yourself or import them from a file, so if you were already keeping a spreadsheet you don't lose what you wrote down.

Spreadsheet or app, what decides the outcome is the same thing: that logging costs you little. An imperfect system you keep for six months tells you far more than a perfect one you abandon in ten days.