Most people who try to track expenses don't fail because they lack discipline. They fail because the system asks too much of them. Open an app, find the right screen, define your categories first, remember to log the transaction later. By the time they've done all that, the habit never forms.
Veridian removes every one of those barriers. The categories exist on first launch. The accounts are ready once you set them up. Logging a transaction takes under 15 seconds. Here is how to use it from day one.
Your First Transaction
The fastest path to your first entry: tap the Expense quick action on the Dashboard, or tap the + button anywhere in the app. This opens the Add Transaction modal with three tabs at the top — Expense, Income, and Transfer. Expense is selected by default.
Enter the amount. Tap the account field and choose which account this came from — you'll see the accounts you created during setup, each showing its currency. Tap the category field and pick from the 14 built-in expense categories: Food & Dining, Groceries, Transport, Shopping, Entertainment, Bills & Utilities, Health, Education, Travel, Subscriptions, Housing, Personal Care, Gifts, or Other. No configuration needed — these are ready immediately.
Add a note if you want context. Tap submit.
That transaction appears in the feed under Today, grouped with the rest of the day's entries. The whole thing took under 15 seconds. That is the core loop — and the rest of this guide is about building it into a complete picture by capturing every type of transaction, not just the obvious ones.
If you haven't set up your accounts yet, the guide on setting up accounts in Veridian covers the five account types and when to use each.
Logging Income — Why It Matters
Expense tracking without income tracking only tells you half the story. If you spend 2,400 this month but don't know your income was 3,000, you don't know whether that spending was sustainable or a stretch. You need both sides to calculate the number that actually matters: net flow.
Tap the Income tab in the Add Transaction modal. The fields are the same — amount, date, account, category, optional note — but the category list changes to Veridian's 8 built-in income categories: Salary, Freelance, Investment, Rental Income, Gift, Refund, Bonus, and Other. Log every source of money coming in: your monthly salary, a freelance invoice paid, a refund credited to your account, a bonus.
The Cash Flow report uses both sides — income and expenses — to calculate your net flow for any period. Without income entries, that report shows only half the picture. Log income as it arrives and the report becomes genuinely meaningful.
Transfers Between Your Own Accounts
This is the most commonly missed transaction type, and getting it wrong corrupts your data more than almost any other error.
When you move money from your bank account to your cash wallet, top up a digital wallet from your savings account, or shift funds between any two accounts you own, that is a transfer — not an expense and not income. Open the Add Transaction modal, tap the Transfer tab. Select the source account, the destination account, enter the amount, and submit.
If you log a transfer as an expense instead, two things go wrong simultaneously: your spending totals for that month are inflated by the transfer amount, and both accounts show incorrect balances. The Transfer transaction type exists specifically to prevent this. Use it every time money moves between your own accounts, even for small amounts.
Cash Purchases — The Habit That Makes or Breaks the Record
Card transactions leave a trail. Even if you don't log them the moment they happen, your bank statement gives you a fallback. Cash leaves nothing. The only way a cash purchase exists in your record is if you log it.
The rule for cash: open Veridian the moment you pay. Not after you leave the shop. Not when you get home. The moment you hand over cash or receive it as change. Select the Cash account (or whichever account holds your physical cash), enter the amount, pick the category, tap submit. This takes 15 seconds and is the single habit that separates a complete financial record from a partial one.
If your cash spending is significant, consider keeping a dedicated Cash account in Veridian that mirrors your physical wallet. Every cash withdrawal from your bank becomes a Transfer from your bank account to your Cash account. Every cash purchase is logged against the Cash account. Your Cash account balance in Veridian should match what's in your wallet.
Backdating When You Forget
Real life means missed entries. The meeting ran long. Your phone was dead. You were in a hurry.
Veridian supports past-dating any transaction. Tap the date and time field in the Add Transaction modal — it defaults to right now, but you can scroll back to set the actual date and time of the purchase. The transaction is stored with the date you set, not the date you logged it.
What you get from a backdated entry: accurate monthly totals, correct category breakdowns, and the right account balance history. What you don't get: a real-time timestamp. That's a fine trade. Log it when you remember and the record will be as accurate as it can be.
One practical note: Veridian blocks future dates. You can't pre-log a transaction that hasn't happened yet. Backdating is fully supported; forward-dating is not.
Reviewing Your Transactions
The Transactions tab shows every entry you've logged, newest first, grouped by date. Entries from today appear under "Today," yesterday's under "Yesterday," older entries under their actual date. This grouping makes it easy to scan a week of spending at a glance.
Three tools for finding specific entries:
Type filter tabs — All, Expenses, Income, Transfers — appear at the top of the list. Tap Expenses to see only outgoing transactions. Tap Transfers to verify that inter-account movements were correctly categorised.
Free-text search — the search field queries across category name, account name, beneficiary name, and note content. Type "pharmacy" and every Health transaction with pharmacy in the note will surface. Type "groceries" to find everything logged to the Groceries category.
A weekly review of 10–15 minutes is enough to catch miscategorised entries, duplicates, or entries that were forgotten and need to be backdated. Pick the same day each week — Sunday evening, Monday morning — and run through the last seven days. For a deeper look at what the numbers mean, the spending reports guide walks through each report type.
The Beneficiary and Note Fields
Both fields are optional, but they answer the two questions that raw category data can't: who did I pay and why.
Beneficiary attaches a named payee to the transaction — a landlord, a contractor, a specific restaurant, a client you're tracking expenses for. Tap the beneficiary field and type a name. If it's someone you've paid before, it auto-suggests from your history. If it's new, type the name and it's created inline — no separate setup required, no settings screen to navigate.
Note is a free-text field that holds up to 1,000 characters. Use it for context that the category doesn't capture: which project a work expense belongs to, which trip a travel purchase was part of, why you bought something in a category that might look unusual later. Notes are searchable in the Transactions list, so a well-written note doubles as a filter.
Neither field is required. Many transactions don't need them. But for anything you might need to explain to yourself — or to an accountant — three months from now, taking five seconds to add a note is worth it.
Putting It Together — The First Week
The complete system for week one is simpler than it sounds:
Day 1: Log everything. Every expense, every income, every transfer between accounts. Use the quick action buttons on the Dashboard for speed. If you miss something, backdate it before the end of the day.
Days 2–5: Keep logging. You will miss things — backdate them when you remember. Don't let a missed entry become a reason to skip the next one. A partial record is more useful than an abandoned one.
Day 7: Open the Transactions tab. Spend 10 minutes reviewing the week. Check that transfers are correctly categorised as transfers (not expenses). Check that cash purchases have accounts logged against your Cash account. Fix anything that looks wrong.
That's it. After 30 days of this habit, open the Category Breakdown report in the Reports tab. Set the period to This Month. You will see exactly where your money went — sorted by category, totalled, and accurate — because you logged it.
If you're working across accounts in different currencies, the multi-currency tracking guide explains how Veridian handles conversion, home currency totals, and cross-currency transfers.
Join the Waitlist
Veridian is launching on iOS and Android. Every feature described here — the 14 expense categories, 8 income categories, Transfer transaction type, backdating, beneficiary and note fields, multi-account support — is built and working. Join the waitlist to be first in.