Tracking your spending: the system that survives week two

Everyone has started a spending spreadsheet on January 1st. Almost nobody has filled it in on February 14th. The problem was never the template: it was friction. A spending system works when logging costs less than not logging.

Rule 1: five seconds or nothing

An expense gets logged in the moment — as you pay for the coffee, in the supermarket queue. Amount, category, done. If the system requires opening a laptop, finding the sheet and remembering what that €12.40 charge was, it’s dead. That’s why expense tracking has to live on your phone — the thing you’re holding when you pay.

Rule 2: few categories

Twenty-five categories give you an illusion of precision and a very real laziness. Eight show you everything that matters:

Category	The question it answers
Groceries	What does eating at home cost?
Eating out	And eating out?
Transport	Fuel, metro, taxis
Home	Rent, power, water, internet
Leisure	Cinema, drinks, plans
Health	Pharmacy, physio, gym
Shopping	Clothes, gadgets
Subscriptions	Netflix, Spotify, iCloud…

Groceries vs. Eating out is, for most people, the single biggest saving lever of the month.

Rule 3: fixed costs log themselves

Rent, gym, Netflix: same amount, same day, every month. Logging them by hand is busywork and forgetting them breaks the numbers. Mark them once as recurring and let the system record them alone — in Planera it’s a switch (“repeats every month”) and the app also tracks your total fixed monthly spend, which is the number that defines what you actually have left.

Rule 4: caps, not guilt

Looking at the month’s total on the 30th only produces retroactive remorse. A cap per category works the other way round: it’s information in time. “€40 of leisure left and 10 days to go” lets you decide; “you spent €280 on leisure” only lets you regret.

Rule 5: review 5 minutes a week

Fold the review into your weekly planning: any category over? Any expense without a category? Is the month’s pace okay? Five minutes is plenty when the data is already logged.

Why an app and not a sheet

A spreadsheet can do the maths — what it can’t do is be in your pocket in the supermarket queue, log the expense in five seconds, record subscriptions by itself and warn you about the cap before you blow it. In Planera, Money is one more planet of the same app where you already keep your tasks, your weekly menu and your workouts: one place, not five.