Everything Chillar's does, indexed
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 app for the web
- Log expenses by category and account, with exact decimal amounts
- Free budget planner and expense planner
- Weekly, monthly and yearly budgets scoped to categories and accounts
- Free online money manager and money tracker
- Accounts, transfers, net worth and a savings buffer in one place
- Multi-currency expense tracker accounts
- Per-account currencies, per-pair rate overrides, exact conversion
- IOU and personal loan tracker
- Lending and borrowing with part-payments and interest records
- Subscription and bill reminder tracker
- Recurring rules, an upcoming list, and one-tap settling
Guides
- How to track expenses (and still be doing it in three months)
- A five-step method for tracking expenses that survives the second week: pick a capture habit, categorise coarsely, reconcile weekly, review monthly.
- How to make a monthly budget from your own numbers
- Build a monthly budget from three months of your own spending instead of a template: find your baseline, set limits that bind, and review it once a month.
- The 50/30/20 rule: what it is and how to run it
- What the 50/30/20 rule is, how to work out your three numbers from after-tax income, where the rule breaks, and how to set it up as three budgets.
- Zero-based budgeting, step by step
- Give every unit of income a job until nothing is left unassigned. How zero-based budgeting works, what it costs in effort, and when it is worth that cost.
- How to track UPI expenses without logging every ₹20 payment
- UPI turns spending into dozens of tiny payments a day. A practical method for capturing them without logging every ₹20 chai by hand, and what to reconcile.
- How to switch expense trackers without losing your history
- Move years of history to a new expense tracker without losing it: export first, check the CSV columns, map them once, then verify three balances by hand.
- A free expense tracker template you can import later
- A free monthly expense tracker template in CSV, the eight columns every tracker needs, and the point at which a spreadsheet stops being worth keeping.
- How to keep a daily expense tracker you do not abandon
- Daily is the only tracking frequency that survives: pick one capture moment, set a threshold for small payments, reconcile weekly and review once a month.
- Choosing a personal expense tracker app in India
- What a personal expense tracker app needs in India: lakh and crore formatting, a UPI method that is not logging every payment, and honest handling of cash.
Comparisons
- Chillar's as a Mint alternative: what carries over and what does not
- Mint shut down in 2024. An honest comparison of what Chillar's replaces, what it leaves out (there is no bank sync), and how to move your history across.
- Chillar's as a Walnut alternative for Indian users
- An honest comparison for Indian users: SMS-based auto-tracking versus manual entry, rupee formatting, loans between people, and what each app does not do.
- Chillar's as an Expensify alternative for freelancers and small businesses
- Expensify scans receipts and reads a corporate card feed. Chillar's is a free expense tracker and expense planner for freelancers and small businesses instead.
- Chillar's vs Money Manager: an honest comparison
- Chillar's and Money Manager both track expenses by hand. Where they differ: pricing, multi-currency handling, budget scoping, data export and platform.
Articles
- Does the 50/30/20 rule work in India?
- The 50/30/20 rule assumes a US cost structure. What changes when rent, family support and festival spending enter the picture, and what to keep fixed.
- How to build an expense tracker project that gets the money right
- The four decisions that separate a portfolio expense tracker from a weekend one: the money type, a schema that survives transfers, isolation, and fixtures.
- Why an expense tracker must not store money as a float
- 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3 in binary floating point. What that means for an expense tracker, where the error shows up first, and what Chillar's does instead.
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.
Start tracking in about two minutes
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