About

Daybook

A private, local-first way to see where your money actually goes.

← Back to the app

What it is

Daybook is a personal finance tracker. Import bank statements, get them sorted into categories, and see your spending for any date range. No install and no sign-up.

Why it's private

Your statements are read and stored in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server: no analytics, no account, no login, and no third-party requests — the fonts and the spreadsheet reader are served from this site rather than a CDN, so you can check the network tab yourself. A Content-Security-Policy makes the browser enforce that rather than leaving it to inspection. Transactions, notes, receipt photos and rules stay on your device, and backups are files you keep.

Because every file is cached on your first visit, Daybook also opens with no network at all, and can be installed like an app.

It's a solo project. No ads, no data resale, free to use.

Features

Importing statements

  • Drop CSV, XLS or XLSX exports anywhere on the page — columns are detected automatically, and when they can't be, you match them once and Daybook remembers
  • Combine statements from several banks into one view, each tagged with its own label — later statements pick theirs from the labels you already use, so an export joins the account it belongs to
  • Duplicates are skipped, both whole files and individual transactions — and when a bank rewords the same payment between statements, it's recognised by date and amount rather than imported twice. That second match ignores which bank a row came from, so two accounts that both have a transaction on the same day for the same amount will see the later import treated as a rewording
  • Dates are read per file rather than per row, so 03/04 isn't guessed at: the whole date column is checked first, and if every date in it is ambiguous the order follows your browser's language and the import tells you which way it read them
  • When a bank stuffs a whole payment record into the description, pick the part worth showing once and the rest of that bank's rows follow — the full text is kept

Categories and rules

  • Keyword rules sort transactions as they arrive, with defaults you can edit — the first rule that matches wins, and your newest rule is tried first
  • A new keyword tells you what it would do before you commit it, and a rule that can never fire — because an earlier one already catches everything it would — is marked as such
  • Change one transaction's category and every other with the same description follows
  • Or tick several rows and move exactly those, when the description isn't what they have in common
  • Exclude categories like transfers to savings, so moving your own money isn't counted as spending

Seeing where money goes

  • Money in, money out and net for any date range, broken down by category, in your currency
  • A monthly trend chart, from three months through to all time — money in against money out, this year against last year, or one category over time
  • Monthly budgets per category, counted against the calendar month, with a marker for how far through the month you are
  • Add one-off transactions by hand, and attach a note or a photo of the receipt
  • Track savings and investment accounts that have no statements — set a value, update it when you check, and see your total wealth

Editing, backups and exports

  • Edit or delete any transaction; your changes survive re-running the rules
  • One-click backup of everything to a single file, restorable in any browser. A backup is untrusted input when it comes back in, so every record in it is rebuilt field by field before it's stored or drawn
  • A reminder when there's something to lose and no copy of it from the last 30 days
  • Export what you're looking at, or the whole daybook, to CSV

Credits & licence

Daybook is free to use. It's source-available rather than open source: you're welcome to run your own copy, and if you publish or share it, please credit it and link back. The full terms are in LICENSE. If it's useful to you, a voluntary contribution is appreciated but never expected.

It stands on three typefaces and one library, all served from this site rather than from anyone else's: