Free Expense Tracker — Private Local Budget & Spending Tracker

Track income and expenses privately in your browser with categories, budgets, rules, recurring transactions, CSV import/export, analytics, receipts, and local backups.

What it does

Expense Tracker is a private, local-first spending ledger. It combines everyday expense tracking with category analytics, monthly budgets, merchant rules, recurring transaction flags, CSV import/export, JSON backup, receipt persistence, and printable reporting.

It is designed for people who want the useful parts of premium budgeting apps without creating an account or sending financial data to a cloud service.

Use the Digital Envelope Budgeter when you want a dedicated envelope-style budgeting workflow. For business or personal cash-flow runway planning, the Burn Rate & Runway Visualizer provides a separate planning view.

How it works

Add income, expenses, or transfers with a date, amount, category, account, merchant, tags, and notes. Transactions are automatically stored locally as your working dataset changes.

Filters let you search by text, category, transaction type, and date range. Category totals, cash flow, budgets, recurring transactions, and simple spending insights update from the filtered ledger.

Automation rules can categorize new transactions or add tags when a merchant matches a rule. CSV imports can be mapped by standard column names, and quoted CSV values are handled correctly for common statement exports.

How to use it

1. Add your first income or expense.
2. Choose or create categories as needed.
3. Use the search and date filters to review spending.
4. Add monthly category budgets and watch actual spending against them.
5. Create merchant rules for repetitive categorization.
6. Import historical CSV data or restore a JSON backup when needed.
7. Export filtered transactions or a complete JSON backup.
8. Attach receipts when you want supporting files kept with your local data.

FAQ

Does this connect to my bank?

No. Bank connections are deliberately not part of the default design. You enter transactions manually or import files such as CSV statements.

Does my financial data leave the browser?

No for the normal tracker. Transactions, settings, working data, and persisted receipt files stay in browser-local storage. There is no bank API or cloud account connection.

Can I import a CSV from my bank?

Yes, provided it is a normal CSV. The import reads common fields such as date, type, amount, category, merchant, account, and description. Different bank exports may use different column names and may require cleanup first.

Can I create budgets?

Yes. You can create monthly category budgets and compare current-month spending with each limit.

Can I automate categories?

Yes. Merchant matching rules can assign categories and tags automatically to new or imported transactions.

Can I back up everything?

Yes. Export a JSON backup containing the working tracker dataset, including categories, rules, budgets, filters, and transactions.

Privacy

The normal expense tracker is local-only. Your financial data and saved dataset do not leave the browser. Receipt files are persisted locally through the tool’s browser-local file storage. There is no default internet feature.

Supported formats

CSV import/export is supported for transaction data. JSON is supported for full tracker backup and restore. Receipt attachments support browser-readable files such as images and PDFs subject to browser storage limits.