Transactions Overview (Incomes and Expenses)

Incomes and Expenses Adding incomes and expenses is at the core of Finance Trails. Set yourself up a regular time to update your Finance Trails incomes and expenses, and you will get great, actionable data to help you increase saving and cut spending. This tutorial will guide you, step by step, through the process of adding Incomes and Expenses in Finance Trails. Click on the "Add Expense" button (or "Add Income" - for this tutorial we will work with expenses, but the process is the same for incomes). This is located in the Finance Trails Sidebar. This will open a dialog box for creating a new expense. In just three steps, your new expense will be added to the system. The first stage categorizes your new expense. You have a variety of categories to choose from. Good categorization at this point will help Finance Trails create useful charts from your financial streams, so take some time to establish the correct category choices for your incomes and expenses. The second stage is where you enter the specific details for this expense. First, we categorize this expense under "Bills", and then choose the "Electricity" sub category. Next, we enter the specific details of the expense: amount (We can also indicate here if this is a periodical expense – see the following point for periodicals); we assign the expense to an existing Account; we specify the payment method; we assign a date for the payment; and then there is a free-text area for your own comments on this expense At this stage, we have already entered enough details to create the expense. If you selected the expense as "periodical" additional fields would appear: details on the date of payment and the frequency with which they occur, and whether you want to set up reminders for the payment. This additional information enables Finance Trails to perform these "transactions" automatically. We have now entered all the relvant information, and can click "next" to enter our details. The expense is now entered.