Logging every transaction is a habit. Reading the reports is the payoff.
Most expense trackers ask for a lot of data entry and give back very little insight. Veridian has five report types, each built to answer a different question about your finances. Used together, they turn a transaction history into a clear picture of where you stand and where your money is actually going. Here is what each one tells you and when to reach for it.
The Period Selector — Set This First
Every report in Veridian shares the same period selector: This Week, This Month, This Year, and Custom date range. Before reading any report, set the period to what you want to understand.
This Month is usually the right starting point — enough data to surface real patterns, recent enough to act on. This Year gives a broader view but requires several months of data to be meaningful. This Week is most useful for a mid-month pulse check.
Custom date range is where things get interesting. Set any start and end date: a holiday, a quarter, a freelance project period. If you consistently log transactions, any date-bounded window becomes reviewable. Tap Custom, set the dates, and every report updates.
Balance Change — the Fastest Health Check
The Balance Change report shows three numbers: your opening balance (what you had at the start of the period), your closing balance (what you have now), and the net change between them — displayed as both an absolute amount and a percentage.
The percentage change is the single fastest indicator of financial direction. Positive means you grew your position during this period. Negative means you drew it down. Below the summary numbers, each account shows its own opening balance, closing balance, and net change, so you can see exactly which accounts gained and which lost ground.
When to use it: at the start of each month, pull up last month's Balance Change. The net percentage tells you immediately whether you built or depleted wealth in that period. If it is consistently negative across two or three months, the other reports will tell you why. If it is positive, they will tell you which behaviors are driving that.
This is the right report to check weekly as a five-second health check — open it on Monday morning, set the period to Last Week, and you have your position before the new week starts.
Cash Flow — Income vs Expenses, Day by Day
The Cash Flow report answers a more granular question: not just whether you came out ahead, but how the money actually moved. It shows total income for the period, total expenses, net flow (income minus expenses), and transaction counts for each side.
The daily breakdown is the most useful part. A bar chart shows each day of the period with income and expenses visible side by side. Days with large expense spikes are immediately visible — a high bar on a Tuesday might be your quarterly insurance payment, or it might be an unusually expensive evening you had forgotten about. The chart makes those anomalies hard to miss.
What to look for: is the net flow positive? Which days had the biggest expense spikes, and were those expected? Is income arriving evenly or in lumps? The last question matters for cash timing — if income arrives in large irregular payments, you need to know your balance will dip between them before recovering. The transaction counts are worth glancing at too: the same expense total in 40 small transactions tells you something different from the same total in 3 large ones.
Category Breakdown — Where Money Actually Goes
This is the most actionable report in the app. It shows each expense (or income) category as a percentage of total, with the absolute amount and transaction count for the period. Toggle between Expense and Income views with the tabs at the top.
The key interaction is the drill-down: tap any category row to see the individual transactions behind that percentage. This is how you move from "Food & Dining is 38% of my spending" to the 23 specific transactions that make up that 38% — and confirm whether the number reflects your actual priorities or a pattern you hadn't noticed.
What to look for: categories whose percentage feels disproportionate. Subscriptions at 12% might be defensible if you use every service; it might also mean several forgotten ones are still running. The Category Breakdown gives you the aggregate; the drill-down gives you the specifics to decide which it is.
The Income view works the same way — tap it to see which income categories contributed what percentage this period. If freelance income is inconsistent month to month, that instability becomes visible here.
Transfers between your own accounts are excluded from this report — they are money moving between buckets you already own, not income or expenses. If your totals look lower than expected, the Transactions list Transfers tab will show whether any transfers were logged incorrectly as expenses.
Account Summary — Per-Account Health
The Account Summary report shows each of your accounts with its total income, total expenses, net flow, and transaction count for the period. It answers a different question from the others: not what categories your money went to, but which accounts are active, which are accumulating, and which are depleting.
This is particularly useful once you have three or more accounts. A Bank account that shows no income and significant expenses is a spending-only account — useful to know. A Savings account that shows consistent income but no expenses is working as intended. A Credit Card account with high expenses and low income might need attention.
Tap any account row to drill into its transaction list, filtered to that account for the period. Combined with the Account Summary report and the account detail view, this gives you a full picture of each account's recent history: the 30-day trend chart in the detail view, and period-specific transaction drill-down from the report.
If you track spending across accounts in multiple currencies, this report shows each account's position in its native currency before conversion. Tap a USD wallet and you see its USD income and expenses for the period. The multi-currency guide covers how home currency conversion works in the aggregate views.
Trend — the Long View
The Trend report is the one you use least often but learn the most from. It compares multiple periods side by side — set it to 6 months and you see six rows, each showing income, expenses, and net flow, with period-over-period change in absolute and percentage terms.
This is where direction becomes visible. A single month tells you what happened. Six months tells you whether you are improving. Income trending upward while expenses stay flat means your position is strengthening. Expenses outpacing income is a signal — and the Trend report makes that pattern impossible to miss.
Use it quarterly. Look at the last three or four months and ask: is my income trend moving in the right direction? Is my expense trend outpacing it? The answers determine whether your next priority should be growing income, reducing expenses, or maintaining a position that is already working.
The Drill-Down Flow — from Report to Transaction
The most useful navigation pattern: Category Breakdown → tap a category → transaction list for that period → tap any transaction to edit or delete. Seeing that Travel is 28% of spending is information. Tapping through to see the specific transactions — and finding two that were miscategorized — lets you fix the record.
The same pattern works in Account Summary: tap an account row, see its filtered transaction list, correct anything that looks wrong.
Building a Monthly Review Habit
The five reports work best in a consistent sequence. A 15–20 minute monthly review covers the full picture:
Start with Balance Change for last month. Positive or negative, and by how much? That single number sets the context for everything else. Move to Cash Flow — where did income come from, which days had the largest expense spikes, is the net flow positive? Then Category Breakdown on the Expense view — which categories ran higher than expected, and drill into any that surprise you. Finish with Trend for the last three months to check direction.
The Account Summary is most useful when you have a specific account question — which accounts are active, which are depleting — rather than as a monthly default.
What the Reports Require
Every report runs from your logged transactions. The more consistently you log, the more useful they become. If your transaction history is thin, Category Breakdown and Cash Flow still work — they just reflect a partial picture. The Trend report becomes genuinely useful after two or three months of consistent logging. Give it that time.
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