The Money Tab: Whether You're Spending Too Fast, Answered on One Screen

The tab used to be called Charts, and it was three charts of the same month in three different encodings: a donut, a weekday bar chart, and a daily line. It showed the data accurately and made no claim about it. You had to do the interpreting. The rebuilt version asks one question instead: am I spending too fast?

In, out, kept

The strip at the top of the screen is three numbers. In is the income you’ve recorded this month. Out is what left, net of discounts. Kept is the difference.

That sounds like the most basic thing a budgeting app can do, and it’s the thing RCT genuinely couldn’t do before this: income was filtered out of every screen at the database query, so the app could tell you what you spent and never what you had. Now income counts. If the month cost more than it paid, the third column is labelled “Over” instead of “Kept”.

If you haven’t logged any income, “kept” is unknowable rather than zero, so it shows a dash and a prompt to add this month’s income. The app won’t accuse you of overspending money it was never told about.

The pace chart

Below that is one chart with three lines:

• So far: a solid line, your cumulative spending day by day this month.
• At this rate: a dashed continuation to the last day of the month.
• Your usual month: a grey dashed line, for reference.

Above the chart, the same claim in words: “At this rate, about €740 by the 31st, €95 more than your usual month.” A badge next to the total says how far off your usual pace you are today, as both an amount and a percentage, or just “on your usual pace” when you’re within 5% of it.

Why “your usual month” isn’t last month

Comparing against last month makes one month an anecdote. A holiday or a new laptop in July makes August look virtuous for reasons that have nothing to do with you. So the grey line is the median of up to three prior months, taken per day of the month: on the 12th, it’s the middle value of what those months had spent by their own 12th.

Those three are picked out of a six-month window, and months whose records are obviously incomplete get dropped. A stretch where you scanned nothing isn’t a frugal month, it’s a month the app knows nothing about, and averaging it in would quietly lower the bar you’re being measured against. The test is a receipt count and total within reach of your best-recorded month in that window, so it measures how well a month was recorded, not how little you spent. A genuinely quiet month with a normal number of receipts stays in.

Why the month is drawn whole

The chart always shows all 30 or 31 days, not just the days that have happened. Truncating at today made early-month spending invisible: on the 5th, everything sat in the bottom eighth of the chart, and “you’ve barely spent anything yet” looks exactly like “you’re fine.”

The dashed projection is what fixes that, and it isn’t today’s average carried forward in a straight line. Spending is lumpy (rent lands on the 1st, the big shop is weekly), so a flat rate on the 5th can project a month 40% above usual at the same moment the badge, comparing day 5 to day 5, correctly says you’re behind. Instead the projection takes the shape of your usual month and scales it by how this one is running, so the sentence and the badge are answering the same question.

If you’ve set a monthly spending goal, it’s drawn as a budget line, but only when the month is actually within reach of it, since a goal far above everything else would flatten the whole chart to make room for itself.

Pills scope the chart, not the page

The row of pills above the chart starts with Overview and then lists the groups you spent in this month, biggest first, with groceries pinned to the front. It’s the group this app exists to measure, and a pill that moves between visits is a pill you have to read before you can tap it.

Tap a group and the chart redraws for that group alone: its own pace, its own projection, its own comparison against what that group usually costs you by this day. A second, quieter row appears underneath with the categories inside it, so you can narrow from Going out to Coffee and see the same reading for just that.

Swipe left or right to change month, or use the arrows in the title. Forward stops at the current month.

Everything else is still there

Two rows sit under the chart.

The first is the last thing RCT notified you about (the store comparison, the discount total, the deposits sitting in your empties), rebuilt from today’s data so you can read it again after swiping the banner away. If the claim no longer holds, the row is gone rather than opening an empty screen.

The second is All the charts, which opens the previous version of this screen: the donut broken down by group, the daily line, the month picker, and the category, tag, and group filters. Nothing was removed to make room for the pace chart; it just isn’t the first thing you land on any more.