Spending & Budgets

Spending & Budgets, introduced in 3.5, brings your day-to-day cash flow into Wealthfolio, right next to your investments. Categorize transactions automatically, set budgets that fit how you actually spend, tag life events, and read spending insights that explain where your money went.

Everything here is computed locally from activities already in your accounts. Nothing about your spending leaves your device.

Transaction amounts

A transaction’s amount is the final cash paid or received, including any fees and taxes. Those charge fields do not reduce cash a second time. After the 3.8 upgrade, check Activities → Needs review for older amounts that need comparison with your statement. Correcting an amount can also change historical spending totals. See Activity Fields.

Choosing spending accounts

Spending features work across the accounts you opt in. You can include multiple cash and credit-card accounts; their activities are aggregated into one cash-flow view.

• Charges (withdrawals, fees, interest) count as spending.
• Refunds / credits reduce spending.
• Credit-card payments move money between your own accounts, so they stay visible without double-counting as spending.
• Money moving from a cash account into an investing account is classified as Saving, kept in its own bucket rather than counted as spend.
• Money brought back from a savings or investment account by a linked transfer counts against saving. Totals show Net saved: what went to savings minus what came back, negative when more came back.
• Transfers between your spending accounts stay neutral.
• Credits imported into a cash account without a subtype are listed in Activities → Spending. They change the balance but count as neither spending nor income.

Categorizing transactions

Every transaction can be assigned to a category. You set up rules once, and Wealthfolio categorizes new transactions for you, with AI to help with whatever’s left.

Categories

Manage categories in Settings → Spending tracker. The category picker shows them as a tree, each parent followed by its own children, with their icons. Category fields and transaction rows and cards show the icon too.

• Move a category under another parent, or to the top level, from its edit dialog: change Parent category, or pick None (top level). Its transactions keep their category, and reports and budgets count it under its new parent. A category with subcategories can’t be moved, and a top-level category with budget targets can’t be moved until you remove them.
• Delete a built-in spending category you never used.

Rules

A rule matches a transaction’s description and assigns a category. Each rule has:

You can start from rule presets (a library of common merchant/category rules), then tweak them. Presets are available for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and Italy. The Italy preset, for Italian banks, covers supermarkets, utilities, telecom and home internet, streaming, fuel, transport, tolls and parking, healthcare, shopping, taxes and PagoPA, bank fees, and income. Refunds aren’t filed as spending.

Rules can be re-run against all transactions or only the uncategorized ones, and Wealthfolio tracks how each assignment was made (rule, AI suggestion, or your own override).

AI suggestions

For transactions no rule covers, the AI assistant can propose categories. Review the proposals, accept the ones that look right, and optionally turn them into reusable rules. See the AI Assistant guide for setup.

Recategorizing or editing a split transaction shows what happens to the split, and asks before removing it. To give a split transaction a single category again, use Replace splits with one category in the split editor.

Editing many transactions in a grid

Activities → Spending has the same view switch as the Investments tab: View mode shows the list and Edit mode a grid. In the grid, change the date, account, type, category, amount, currency, or comment of many rows, paste or fill across cells, then Save them together. Phones and narrow screens keep the list.

Budgets

Open Budgets to plan a month and watch actuals fill in against your targets.

Groups and targets

Categories are organized into budget groups: Needs, Wants, Savings, Giving, Personal, and Other by default, each with its own colour and icon. You can budget at two levels:

• Category targets: a monthly target per category.
• Group buffer: an extra amount at the group level. The group total is the sum of its category targets plus its buffer.

Monthly periods, rollovers, and copy

• Budgets are scoped to a month (a YYYY-MM period). Default targets apply to every month, and you can override any single month.
• Rollover carries an unused or overspent balance forward into the next month. Enable it per category or per group.
• Copy last month clones a previous month’s plan into the current one in a click, so you don’t rebuild your budget every month.

The budget snapshot shows, per category and group: the target, the actual spend, the remaining amount (target − actual), and an overspent flag when you’ve gone over.

Life events

Mark events like a vacation, a wedding, or a home renovation on a timeline and tag the transactions that belong to them. Each event then totals up its true cost.

• Events are date-ranged (a start and end date) and colour-tagged. Several event types are seeded, and you can create your own.
• Tag any transaction to an event to include it in that event’s total.
• An event summary shows the total spent, the transaction count, a breakdown by category, and a day-by-day spending chart.

Spending insights

Spending insights is the Spending tab in Insights, next to Overview, Performance, and Income, with the same cards and period selector as the other tabs. It shows only when spending is turned on. It reads like a short narrative in three stages.

1 · Where I am

• Pace: your trailing 7-day average daily spend, days elapsed and remaining, and projected total for the period, compared against your budgeted pace. A health status reads on track, approaching, over, or cashflow negative.
• Spent this period: the period total with a change versus the previous period, plus the category breakdown and top movers.
• Net cash flow: income minus outflow minus net saved, over time.
• Money flow: where your money came from and where it went. Money brought back from savings shows as From savings beside income, and money moved to savings as To savings.
• Breakdown: a hierarchical category table of actual versus budget.

2 · What changed

• A plain-language headline (“You spent $X this period vs. $Y last period”) with the percentage change.
• Category movers: what is new, what ended, and which categories rose or fell the most, ranked by impact.
• Per-category sparklines and a table of the biggest increases and decreases.

3 · When & where

• A weekday × hour heatmap of the last several weeks; click any cell to see the transactions in that time slot.
• The events timeline, with each event expandable to its category breakdown and daily spend.

Multi-currency

Spending is reported in your base currency. When transactions span several currencies, amounts are FX-converted using rates from the period-end date, and the page notes this. Native (original- currency) totals remain available so nothing is hidden behind the conversion.

Drilling in

Almost every number is clickable:

• A category row opens a filtered transaction list (including its subcategories).
• A heatmap cell opens the transactions for that weekday and hour.
• An event opens its breakdown by category and daily spend.

Related

• Activities: how transactions get into Wealthfolio.
• AI Assistant: AI category suggestions and assisted import.
• Allocation Targets & Rebalancing: the other major 3.5 module.