Adding an expense is the most frequent thing you'll do in FamSpend. Five fields, thirty seconds, and it lands immediately in your calendar, the Cost Center totals, and the Home — Today & Upcoming list.
The five fields
From any screen, Add expense opens the form:
| Field | What goes here | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Title | What it is — e.g. "March gas bill" | Yes |
| Amount | The exact amount in euros, or an estimate | No (see below) |
| Due date | The day it needs to be paid (YYYY-MM-DD) | Yes |
| Cost Center | The container it belongs to | Yes |
| Person | Who pays or who's involved | No |
That's it. You save and the expense shows up in the chosen Center, in the calendar on the right date, and in Home if it's coming up soon.
Title: write it like you'd say it out loud
The title is there so you can recognize the expense at a glance. Write it like you'd say it telling someone: "March gas bill", "Car service", "April rent". No codes, no cryptic formulas.
If the expense is recurring (it'll come back every month or year), a generic-but-readable title works better: "Rent" instead of "April 2026 rent" — FamSpend already knows the month from the date.
Amount: exact, estimate, or "to be determined"
Three possible cases, and the display changes accordingly:
- Exact amount → enter
142.00→ expense shows€142.00 - Rough estimate → enter a number and turn on the estimate flag →
expense shows
~€142(with tilde prefix) - You don't know yet → leave blank → expense shows "to be determined"
The to-be-determined case is a deliberate choice. See
Amounts "to be determined": planning without knowing yet
for why FamSpend doesn't force you to write €0.
Due date: the day you pay
The due date is the planned payment day, not the invoice or receipt date. For a bill that arrives March 15 with payment due April 7, the date you put in FamSpend is April 7 — that's when the calendar shows it.
If the payment date shifts (paid early, postponement), you can change the date anytime. The calendar updates automatically.
Cost Center: where it goes
Pick the Center that best represents the area of the expense: the gas bill goes in Home, the car service in Car, daycare in Kids.
If you're torn between two Centers, pick the one you'd open to check how much you're spending on that area. You can always move it later (see Moving expenses between Cost Centers).
Person: who pays
Optional but useful. If you have multiple people in the workspace (partner, flatmate, kids with accounts), associating an expense with who pays lets you filter "how much did I spend" or "how much did they spend".
An expense can be linked to multiple people when it's shared (see Splitting an expense among multiple people).
What you do NOT need to enter
- Category — they don't exist in FamSpend, see What are Cost Centers
- Bank / payment method — FamSpend doesn't track balances or accounts, it plans expenses
- Notes — you can add them later if needed, but they aren't required
Recurrences: enter once, repeat forever
For expenses that come back every month (rent, subscriptions) or every year (insurance, road tax), there's a recurring mode — you plan it once and FamSpend re-proposes it at the right time. See Recurring expenses.
Shortcuts
- AI Helper — attach a bill or receipt to the chat, the AI extracts title / amount / due date / Center and just asks for confirmation
- Excel import — if you have a sheet with 200 expenses to load, go to Import / Export and upload the CSV in one go (see Importing from Excel)
For one-off expenses, the 30-second form is the fastest path.