A budget that does not need you

There are two kinds of money system. One asks you to record each purchase as it happens; it is precise, it is complete, and almost nobody keeps it past the first busy fortnight. The other asks you to look at what already happened; it is less precise, it requires nothing daily, and people keep it for years.

The second one is better, because a system you abandon measures nothing at all.

Your bank already did the recording

Every card payment is already written down, by somebody who is paid to get it right. The work is not recording — it is reading. Once a month, go through the feed and put each line into a handful of groups: home, food, transport, health, fun, other.

Six groups, not twenty-six. Twenty-six groups is a filing system; six is a picture. You are not doing accountancy, you are answering one question — where did it go — and six answers are enough to act on.

Cash is the hole, and it is smaller than you think

Cash does not appear in the feed, which bothers people enough to abandon the whole approach. Do not. Record the withdrawal as a single line called cash and let it be imprecise. For most people this is now a small share of spending, and a system that covers ninety per cent and survives beats one that covers everything and does not.

What to do with the picture

Compare two months, not one. One month tells you nothing — it was unusual, they all are. Two months next to each other tell you what is structural, and structural is the only thing worth changing.

Then pick one group and one change. Not five. The month after that, check whether the number moved; if it did not, the change was imaginary.

Where a space helps

Here the reading part is done by dropping a screenshot of the bank feed onto the money screen: the lines are read, grouped and put next to the rest of the month, and corrections take a click. Ten minutes once a month, and nothing to fill in daily.