An expense tracker for India, in rupees

Why a generic expense app often fits India badly

Many expense apps assume a month of card swipes and a bank feed that fills the ledger on its own. Money in India moves differently. Small payments go over UPI, larger ones on a credit card, plenty still in cash, and EMIs and SIPs leave the bank on their own schedule. Amounts are written in lakh and crore, not thousands and millions.

An expense tracker that ignores that ends up with a ledger that has the right total and the wrong story. Trove records how each payment was made as a first-class field, and uses rupees and Indian digit grouping by default.

What Trove records for each expense

• The merchant or person, the amount in ₹ and the date.
• How you paid: UPI, credit card, cash, bank transfer, or other. Trove never guesses a method you did not state.
• A category, suggested from rules you can read and always yours to change.
• Optionally, a receipt attached to the transaction.

Because the payment method is stored on the transaction, you can later ask a question a plain category total cannot answer: how much of last month went out over UPI, and how much on the card you meant to pay down.

Three ways to add spending

Say it

Tap the mic and say “Zomato 450 UPI yesterday”. Trove reads it into a merchant, an amount, a payment method and a date, and fills in the form for you to review before saving. The reading happens in your browser, using its own speech recognition, and Trove keeps no audio. It works in Chrome, Edge and Safari. The home page has a short walkthrough with sample data.

Drop in a statement

Most Indian banks let you download a statement from net banking as a CSV, a spreadsheet or a PDF. Drop the file into Trove’s inbox and it lists what it found as candidate transactions, checks them against what you already have so the same payment is not added twice, and keeps the original file. Nothing becomes a transaction until you confirm it.

One thing worth knowing: the file is read by a language model, and its text is sent through a provider chosen not to train on or keep it. The privacy policy has the details. It is also why you should glance at the amounts and dates before confirming.

Add them one at a time

For cash and for the occasional payment that never reaches a statement, the quickest route is still a single entry. Doing it the same day takes a few seconds and keeps the ledger honest.

Categories you can read and change

Trove files a transaction with plain rules that match the merchant and the description. The rules are written out in the categorisation guide, so when something lands in the wrong place you can see why and fix it. Every account starts with a small set of categories (UPI spends, credit card, investments, travel, food and a miscellaneous group that holds fuel and shopping) plus income, transfer and a catch-all. You can rename them, add your own and nest one level deep.

A short list is deliberate. A category list you can hold in your head is one you will keep using.

Seeing where the month went

Analytics cover the last one, three, six or twelve months, or any two dates you choose. You see spending by category, by merchant and by payment method. Budgets can carry unused money into the next month, and savings goals show the monthly pace needed to reach them. Reports export as PDF, Excel or CSV when you want them somewhere else.

A ten-minute monthly routine

1. Import the statement. Download it from your bank, drop it in, confirm the rows.
2. Add what the statement cannot know. Cash spending, and anything paid by someone else on your behalf.
3. Clear the catch-all. Anything filed under “Other” is a merchant the rules did not know. Re-file it once and the next one is easier.
4. Compare with last month. Look at the three largest categories first, then at the payment-method split.
5. Check what repeats. The subscription list shows the charges that come back every cycle.

What Trove does not do

• It has no bank connection and never asks for a bank login or a UPI PIN.
• It does not read your SMS or connect to UPI apps.
• It is not tax or GST software, and it does not give investment advice.

That keeps the trade-off simple: you do a little entering, and in return nothing outside your own account can see your money. The security page lists what protects your data today and, just as plainly, what is not in place yet.