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?

The month, drawn as candles

The chart is one candle per day, for every day of the period, not only the ones you spent on. A spending day’s body spans that day’s opening and closing running total, the way a trading chart draws one, and it wears the color of the subcategory that led that day. A quiet day is a short pale block sitting at the running close, where the total is still standing.

Because a quiet day still draws a block at the current total, the chain of candles is continuous, and its top edge traces the staircase of the month. Color marks where money moved, paleness marks where none did. Drag across the chart and the readout tells you what that day was actually made of, since a candle is split into the categories that filled it rather than being one solid bar.

Two dashed lines sit with it:

• At this rate: today’s close carried on to the last day of the period.
• Your usual month: the median of your last three months, 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 beside 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 are 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 the month on screen has nothing in it yet, the chart doesn’t go blank. It draws your usual month instead, as a preview, and says so, so an empty period still tells you what a normal one costs.

The line to stay under

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.

Scope the chart to a single category and that line changes meaning on purpose: it becomes that category’s own limit rather than your monthly goal, and the label above it says which of the two you’re looking at. A scoped chart should be judged against the number that governs the thing it’s scoped to.

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. Only ever one extra row, and only for the group you already chose, so the two levels never read as two competing filters.

The month you’re reading sits in the title bar rather than the screen having a name of its own: which month these numbers describe is the one piece of context everything below depends on. Swipe left or right to change it, or use the arrows. Forward stops at the current month. If your month starts on payday rather than the 1st, every number on this screen is cut on that boundary instead.

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.