Expenses Help

Introduction
Getting started
Entering transactions
Preferences
Send data by email
FAQ
Feedback

Introduction

With Expenses you can fast and easily record expenses and income of cash, checking, credit card, etc. on the go. You can add notes and categories to your transactions and define your own categories and accounts. Balances are kept for each account. A self learning text completion feature makes data entry easy, especially for recurring entries. Collected data can be sent to your PC via email where you can analyze it with Excel or import it into your favorite desktop accounting software. A clever clean up feature allows keeping only current entries on the device, while maintaining balances. With Expenses, bookkeeping is fun! The application includes a comprehensive manual explaining every feature in detail. You can preview it at http://www.smp-apps.com/expenses/ (see Help / Online Manual).
Besides English, the application is fully localized for German. Other languages will follow.

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Getting started

1. Tap onto the entry "initial balance" and change the amount.
2. Select "preferences" in the menu and define you accounts and categories.
3. Add new entries by tapping on the button at the lower left.
4. You can send transaction data to your email account by selection the menu command "Send data". Data then can be analyzed or imported into your desktop account software.

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Entering transactions

Transaction list

Shows all transactions, grouped by day. Amounts are colored red for expenses and green for incomes. The balance of the default account is displayed in the header. By tapping on the header you can display the balances of all accounts.
Tapping on the button "New entry" opens the edit window for transactions. You can also edit an existing transaction by tapping on it. Transactions can be deleted by swiping them off the screen to the right.

Edit transaction

With "type" you select expense or income, expense is default. The cursor is in the amount field, input mode is set to NUM LOCK (like double pressing the orange key). After you have entered the amount you can switch to the description field by tapping into it, or by pressing the enter key on the keyboard.

Text completion: the descriptions you enter are automatically recorded. When you have entered a few transactions, a window with suggestions will pop up after you have typed the first letter of the description. Tap on the appropriate list entry, or type more characters to filter the list. The list will close if there are no matches.
Tip: in preferences you can remove unwanted entries from the list.

You can select category and account for the transaction from popup lists. You can define your categories and accounts in the preferences window. You also can change the order. For new transactions the first category and the first account are preset.

The date is preset with today and can be changed by tapping onto it.

When you are finished tap on the "Done" button. If you want to discard, use the back gesture (swiping from right to left in the gesture area below the screen).

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Preferences

The command "preferences" in the menu on the upper left opens the preferences window. Here you can define categories and accounts, edit text completion entries, and clean up your transactions.

Defining categories

The button "categories" opens the window for category definition. You can add a new category by tapping on "+ New category" at the end of the list. Existing categories can be renamed by tapping onto them. The list can be reordered by dragging (the first category in the list will be default for new transactions).
Unneeded categories can be deleted by swiping them off the screen to the right. Note: you cannot delete categories when there are transactions with this category. In this case a message will pop up. The last category cannot be deleted; there must be at least one category.

Categories serve for information only in transactions. At the moment the application offers no means to evaluate them but they are included in the email data so that you can evaluate them with Excel or another program.

Defining accounts

Account definitions work just the same way like category definition.

Edit text completion

The button "text completion" in the preferences window opens an alphabetically ordered list of all transaction descriptions you have entered so far. You can delete unwanted entries by swiping them off the screen to the right. Adding and editing of entries is not implemented.
You can delete all entries by clicking on the button at the very end of the list.
Tip: you can create transactions with descriptions that you wand to add to the text completion list, and delete these transactions afterwards.

Clean up

With clean up you can delete old transactions. You can select the number of days to keep. 0 deletes all transactions, 1 keeps transactions of today only, 2 keeps transactions of yesterday and today. You can select up to 30 days. Balances are not affected by clean up, their values remain the same. Also the list of text completion entries remains unchanged.
Attentions: this operation cannot be undone! If you want to analyze your data on your PC be sure to the send the data by email before you start clean up.

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Send data by email

Send data for analysis or import on your PC

To analyze your data on your PC or to import your data into your desktop accounting software you can send the transaction list by email to your email account. Select "Send data" from the menu. Enter your email address and choose the data format (HTML or CSV). Enter the email address of the email account that you use to receive email on your PC. The address will be saved and preset the next time you use this feature.

Tapping on "Send data" creates and displays an email message with the transaction data. You then simply need to tap on the "send" symbol on the lower right of the email screen.

Data formats for the transaction list are "CSV" and "HTML". HTML creates a table that can be copied directly to the clipboard and pasted into Excel for further analysis. CSV data can be copied from the email body into a text file for import and further processing with another program.

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FAQ

Change default account for balance display

Move the wanted account to the top of list at preferences / accounts.

Display balances of all accounts

In the transaction list, tap on the header where the balance of the default account is displayed.

Default account and category for new transactions

New transactions have preset the first account and category of the respective list.
Move the account or category that you want as default to the top of the list by dragging it.

Change balance

In the list of balances of all accounts (tap on header where the default account balance shows) you can tap on an account to open a dialog where you can enter the balance.
Alternatively you can create a correction transaction with the according difference as income or expense.

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Feedback

You are welcome to send us feedback and suggestions by email to feedback@smp-apps.com.