See where your money goes, across all your banks and cards

Expense tracking and insights in FinLens

Two pages work together. Transactions lists every debit and credit from your alerts and statements in one dated table, with Total spent, Total received, Net cash flow and Top category above it. You can filter by bank, by one account or card, by category, channel or source, by amount, or search the merchant and reference.

Insights reads those figures for the date range you pick and sorts what stands out into four groups: Needs attention, Worth a look, Going well and For the record. The Dashboard adds Spending by category and Money in and out for the same range.

Why expense tracking usually breaks down

Your spending is split across UPI, debit cards, credit cards and net banking, at more than one bank. Each bank labels its rows in its own codes, the same purchase shows up once as an alert and again on the statement, and moving money between your own accounts or paying a card bill looks like spending when it is not. Typing it all into a spreadsheet lasts a month or two.

FinLens reads the rows for you, files them by fixed rules, keeps each spend counted once, and leaves you to correct only what it got wrong.

Who an expense tracker like this suits

• Anyone who wants to know where the month's money went without keeping a spreadsheet.
• People whose spending runs across several banks and cards.
• Anyone who wants a monthly check of savings rate and upcoming dues, as in our monthly money review.
• People who prefer rules they can read to predictions they cannot check.

What the spending insights tell you

How spending insights are worked out

1. Bring in your transactions

   Upload bank and card statements, or connect Gmail so alert e-mails are read on the hourly check from 06:00 to 23:00 IST.

2. FinLens files each transaction

   Fixed rules choose one of 24 categories, such as Food & dining, Groceries, Rent, EMI, Bill payment or Transfer, from what the narration says and from a list of known merchants.

3. Correct what it got wrong

   Open a transaction and choose Change category. Tick Apply to every transaction whose merchant contains to fix the same merchant everywhere, or add a rule in Settings under Rules; your rules win over the built-in ones.

4. Pick a range

   Choose 1M, 3M, 6M, 1Y, 2Y or 5Y at the top of the page, or set your own dates.

5. Read Insights

   Tap a group's tile to see only that level. Most insights link to the transactions, bills or holdings behind them, and How these are computed lists the rules.

What you add to your expense tracking

• Bank and card statements, or a connected Gmail account for alert e-mails.
• Your corrections: a category changed on a transaction, or a rule that maps a merchant to a category or a display name.
• Optionally, a note on any transaction, such as what a payment was for.

What the expense tracker reads and works out

• For every transaction: date, amount, debit or credit, the merchant text, the channel, the bank reference and, for a card, its last 4 digits where known.
• Spending by category, income, net cash flow and the top category for the range you choose.
• Insights from fixed rules over these totals and your open bills. The text of your e-mails is never sent to an AI model, with one exception: when no rule opens a locked attachment, the mail's one sentence about its password may be read, masked, to find the rule.
• An export of the filtered table as a CSV file, up to 5,000 rows at a time.

Good to know about spending insights

• FinLens works from what your statements and alerts show, so cash you spend after withdrawing it appears once, as a cash withdrawal.
• Categories come from fixed rules and can be wrong; a quick correction with a merchant rule fixes the rest.
• Insights describe your figures; they are not predictions or financial advice, and nothing here promises savings.
• Spending is measured against your own history; FinLens does not set per-category budgets or spending limits.
• A spike is measured against your own previous six months, so it needs some history before it appears.

Questions about spending insights in FinLens