Expense, am i being smart with my money?

Ask an expense tracker whether you are being smart with your money and it will refuse. Expense refused too, until now. It knows what you spent, not what you earn. That refusal was honest, and useless.

It also assumed something false: that judging a year of spending requires someone else's numbers. Most of what makes a year smart or dumb is sitting in the records already. What has no category, so nothing can be claimed for it. What never made it into a report. What got entered twice. What charges you the same amount every month.

So Expense looks for those things and writes them down. The card above is a made up year of freelance spending. Four fill-ups with no category. Three expenses in no report. Three subscriptions repeating monthly at $972 a year. Two receipts with no image behind them. The same coffee entered twice. Spending up 30% on the same period last year.

Two things make it work.

The numbers come from the app, not from the model. The model's job is to see which finding is worth acting on and say it in a sentence. Every figure in the answer above can be traced to a row.

And it never grades you against anyone else. It compares your year to your last year, your rows to your other rows. When there is nothing to report, it says so instead of inventing a finding.

It still cannot see your income or your bank balance. It says that in one sentence rather than hiding behind it. The "at this rate" line is a straight line from the year so far, not a prediction, and the answer calls it that.

Which leaves a more useful question. What else does an app refuse to answer that it already has the data for?

Try it: Expense