The big Swiss costs are easy to plan. Rent, health insurance and your phone plan are the same every month, and you know them before the month starts. What's hard to plan is everything else: the weekly shop at Migros or Coop, a dinner out that came to CHF 140 for two, a train ticket you didn't see coming. That's the part a monthly budget is for, and it's exactly the part a spreadsheet only knows about if you type it in.
Spentio fills that part in for you. Your spending comes straight from your bank statements, sorted into categories, and each budget works out what's left as the month goes. Here's how to set one up.
Four steps to a monthly budget
1. Upload a few months of spending
Upload your bank statement as a PDF, a screenshot or a photo of your banking app. Magic Import, our AI, reads every transaction and sorts it into a category. It works with statements from Swiss banks like PostFinance, UBS or Raiffeisen, and just as well with the account you kept back home, so both end up in the same budgets. Two or three months give the next steps something real to work from.
2. Pick what you want to keep an eye on
Go to Planning › Budgets, choose +, then Budget. Suggestions based on your own spending are at the top. Budget a whole category, say everything you spend on food, or just one part of it, like eating out.
3. Choose how often it starts over
Monthly starts over on the 1st. Yearly is one limit for the whole year, which suits things you don't buy every month, like clothes or gifts. Between dates covers dates you set, like a summer trip or a move.
Spentio fills in the amount from what you've spent in that category so far. Keep it or type your own. For a category you haven't spent anything in yet, you set the limit yourself.
4. Keep the fixed costs in Recurring
Rent, health insurance premiums and your phone plan don't belong in a budget. Add them under Planning › Recurring and they don't count toward any budget. What's left in your budgets is the spending you can actually steer.
What you see from then on
Your budgets open on what's left this month. Each monthly budget turns that into an amount per week, like "CHF 95 a week", so you know how much this week's shopping can come to. If you're spending faster than that, it shows roughly when the money will run out. A yearly budget shows how much of the limit you've used next to how much of the year has gone.
Tap a budget to open its own page: this month day by day, with your latest payments right below it. Look at a longer stretch and it also tells you in how many months you went over. Spentio lets you know when you reach the level you picked, and again when the limit is used up.
A few months in, if a limit no longer fits the way you actually live, Spentio suggests raising or lowering it in Control. One tap does it, and it can be undone.
Why not a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet holds the plan. Spentio also shows you where you stand, without typing a single line. The arithmetic is done for you, your budgets are on your iPhone when you're at the till, and your data stays in Switzerland. Pay with Apple Pay and the purchase is in Spentio the moment you pay, before any statement arrives.
Get started
Setting up a monthly budget in Spentio takes a few minutes, and every statement you upload after that brings it up to date. The step-by-step guide walks through every tap.
Start free, no credit card needed.