Documentation

Everything Chillar's does, indexed. Each entry opens with a direct answer, so this page works as a reference on its own as well as a map of the rest of the site.

Machine-readable versions: /llms.txt (index) and /llms-full.txt (everything on this page as plain text).

Features

Free expense tracker: Chillar's is a free expense tracker for the web. You log an expense with an amount, a category and an account; it stores the amount as an exact decimal, groups your history by day, and shows income, expenses and the balance for any period you choose.
Budget planner: Chillar's budgets cover a week, a month or a year and can be scoped to any set of categories and accounts. Each budget shows the amount spent inside its own period, what remains, and an over-budget state, all computed from your own transactions.
Money manager for the web: Chillar's tracks accounts, transfers between them, budgets, loans and planned payments in one place. Net worth is the sum of every account balance converted to your base currency, with excluded accounts left out and a savings buffer you can set and measure against.
Multi-currency accounts: Every account in Chillar's has its own currency. Net worth converts each balance to your base currency using published rates, refreshed daily, and you can override any individual rate. An account whose rate is missing contributes zero rather than a wrong number.
Loan tracker: A loan in Chillar's records who and how much, then accumulates records: repayments, additional borrowing, and interest. Each record can move real money in a linked account. The loan's remaining balance is total borrowed minus principal repaid, with interest kept separate.
Planned payments and subscriptions: A planned payment is a transaction with a due date instead of a date. Recurring rules generate future instances (weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly), and the dashboard lists what is overdue and what is coming inside the current period.

Guides

How to track expenses (and still be doing it in three months): Track expenses by recording every payment the moment it happens, sorting it into fewer than fifteen categories, reconciling against your account balance once a week, and reviewing category totals once a month. Capture speed matters more than category precision.
How to make a monthly budget from your own numbers: Make a monthly budget by averaging your last three months of spending per category, setting a limit just below that average for the two or three categories you want to change, and leaving the rest alone. Budgets built from templates fail because they describe someone else's life.
The 50/30/20 rule: what it is and how to run it: The 50/30/20 rule allocates after-tax income as 50% needs, 30% wants and 20% savings or debt repayment. Work out the three numbers from your take-home pay, sort each category into one of the three buckets, and track the buckets rather than individual categories.
Zero-based budgeting, step by step: Zero-based budgeting assigns every unit of expected income to a category (spending, saving or debt) until the unassigned amount is zero. You rebuild the allocation each period from your real income rather than adjusting last period's plan.
How to track UPI expenses without logging every ₹20 payment: Track UPI expenses by logging anything above a threshold you set (₹200 is a common one) as it happens, then reconciling the remainder as a single 'small payments' entry each evening against your bank balance. Chasing every micro-payment is what makes people quit in week two.
How to switch expense trackers without losing your history: Switch expense trackers by exporting from the old app before you cancel anything, importing the CSV with an explicit column mapping, and then verifying three account balances by hand against the old app. If those three match, the rest almost certainly did too.

Comparisons

Chillar's as a Mint alternative: what carries over and what does not: Chillar's replaces Mint's manual tracking, budgeting and reporting, and is free to use with full data export. It does not replace Mint's automatic bank sync or credit-score monitoring: you enter transactions by hand or import them from CSV.
Chillar's as a Walnut alternative for Indian users: Chillar's gives Indian users rupee formatting in lakh and crore, loan tracking between people, multi-currency accounts and full data export, free of charge. Unlike Walnut it does not read SMS to detect transactions, so you enter or import every transaction yourself.
Chillar's vs Money Manager: an honest comparison: Both apps are manual expense trackers with budgets and reports. Chillar's is free, browser-based and exports everything; Money Manager is a mature mobile app with a paid tier and a longer feature history in areas like recurring reports.

Articles

Does the 50/30/20 rule work in India?: Partly. The 20% savings target transfers well and is worth defending. The 50% needs ceiling usually does not, because metro rent and family support push needs past it. The practical adaptation is to keep savings at 20% and let needs and wants absorb the difference.
Why an expense tracker must not store money as a float: Binary floating-point numbers cannot represent most decimal fractions exactly, so 0.1 + 0.2 evaluates to 0.30000000000000004. In a money app the error accumulates across thousands of rows and surfaces as totals that disagree with the transactions they are made of.

Glossary

Net worth: Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe. In a personal finance app it is the sum of every account balance, converted to one currency, with debts counted as negative balances.
Cash flow: Cash flow is the money that came in minus the money that went out over a period. Positive cash flow means you finished the period with more than you started; negative means you drew down savings.
Savings rate: Savings rate is the share of your income you did not spend, expressed as a percentage. It is calculated as income minus expenses, divided by income, over the same period.
Emergency fund: An emergency fund is money set aside to cover essential expenses if income stops. You hold it in an account you can draw on the same day, sized in months of expenses, commonly three to six.
Sinking fund: A sinking fund is money saved gradually for a known future expense, such as an annual insurance premium or a replacement laptop, so the payment does not arrive as a shock.
Zero-based budgeting: Zero-based budgeting assigns every unit of income a job: spending, saving or debt repayment, until nothing is unassigned. The budget balances at zero, which describes a plan rather than an empty account.
50/30/20 rule: The 50/30/20 rule splits after-tax income into 50% needs, 30% wants and 20% savings or debt repayment. It is a starting allocation, not a law, and is meant to be adjusted to your cost of living.
Discretionary spending: Discretionary spending is money spent on things you chose rather than things you were committed to. It is the part of a budget that can change next month without renegotiating anything.
Fixed expense: A fixed expense is a recurring cost of roughly the same amount each period: rent, a loan instalment, insurance, a subscription. It is predictable, which makes it easy to plan and easy to forget.
Base currency: Your base currency is the single currency all totals are reported in. Accounts can be held in any currency; each balance is converted to the base currency before net worth, budgets and reports are calculated.

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