Your bank app can already tell you where the money went.
You have looked. You know what you spend. It changed nothing, and by now you have probably decided that part is your fault.
It is not.
Start, free for 60 days How it works
No card. Nothing to connect.
The chart arrives after the money is gone
A statement, a category breakdown, a year in review. All of it lands weeks late, when there is nothing left to decide.
A kakeibo (家計簿) puts the moment back where the decision is. You write the thing down while you are standing there and tap one word for why. Four seconds.
Hani Motoko, a Japanese newspaper reporter, published it in 1904 for households that had no statements and no charts. It predates every app that has failed you, and it runs on the one thing all of them took out.
It was also wrong about your good months
Say you moved $500 into retirement last month. Your budgeting app files that under spending, because it left your checking account.
So the month reads as a loss. You look at it and think you are slipping backwards.
You did not lose $500. You still have it. It went from one pocket of yours to another, and your own ledger called that a loss.
Money that is gone is Burn. Money that moved and is still yours is not. What came in, less what actually went, is the change in what you are worth. This book checks that every month.
What it asks of you
Four seconds, a few times a day. The amount, one word, one tap for why.
- Needrent, food
- Wantdining, treats
- Growbooks, courses, culture
- Unexpectedrepairs, illness
- Givecharity, gifts
Your pay goes in once, on payday. Bills that come round every month are remembered, so the figure is waiting when they do. What you type is the day to day: the coffee, the groceries, the thing you did not plan on.
The four seconds never go away. That is the trade, and it is why this works where the chart did not.
You will notice there is no total on that screen while you type. The moment you can see what is left, you stop writing down what you bought and start deciding what to call it. Dinner becomes Need. Everybody does it. It is not a character flaw.
The week you miss
You will miss a week. Most people do, somewhere around the third one.
Nothing here scolds you for it. No streak to break, nothing red, and no catching up to do. A day with nothing written might be a day you spent nothing, and this book will not guess which.
Come back on the Sunday and the week is where you left it.
By the third month the point of it turns up, and it is not a number. It is knowing roughly where you stand without having to go and look. Room to breathe.
What we will not do
- We never connect to your bank. Not "we do not have to." We do not. There is nowhere here to put a bank password.
- We never sell or share your data. No advertising, no brokers, no partner who gets a copy.
- We never tell you what to buy, own, or hold. You get your own numbers back. The verdict is yours.
If you keep this with somebody else, you choose what you share, and a shared entry never records who wrote it. Nobody can find out which of you bought the groceries.
We are a ledger. We never hold, move, or touch your money.
What it costs
$96 a year
Or $9 a month. One tier, so nothing better is being kept from you. Sixty days free, no card. The first thing this does that a spreadsheet cannot is let you hold one month against the next, and that takes two months to happen.
$96 CAD in Canada, at parity rather than converted. What you pay when you join is what you keep paying.