Mobile Friendly View to Log Your Expenses In Notion
Hate to add your spendings with Notion mobile app? I will show you the trick I use to make it less painful for me.
This trick will work if you prefer to log your spending right after making it to not get it lost. And usually you do not have your laptop around, but your phone is in your pocket.
That would be nice to add your spendings in several clicks while waiting for your receipt from a cashier. Or it would be even nicer to log your spending with one hand while your other hand is grabbing the coffee you have just paid for.
But Notion is quite painful when it comes to adding something a bit more complicated than a simple note with their mobile app. And usually you would either decide to log your spending later or try it and freak out at the first place and then again decide to log your spending later. The chance is that eventually the whole system will not work and you will hate it (my story).
If you have not got your expenses tracker in Notion yet and you do not want to spend time for building it by yourself, consider this ready to use template
Ok, what is the trick?
Now I will make some assumptions. I assume that you have a separate database for all your spendings. And it’s very likely that this database has category and date properties. Of course it may have more columns, but we will start from these two.
And now we will build a page which will prefill date and category for your new spendings.
1. Create a separate page with linked view for your expenses.
Create a separate page which will serve for adding spending from your phone. And then add to this page a linked view of your spendings database.
To create a Linked View→ type /linked
→ choose Linked view of database in dropdown menu
→ choose your expenses database to be the source
Update this view to be a table or a list (I prefer List)
To make the view to be a table or a list→ open database menu (three dots in the database top right)
→ choose Layout
→ choose either Table or List
with linked view for expenses
2. Add date filter
First of all reset Filter and Sort settings if there are some of them pulled from the original database to your linked view.
Let’s start from configuring the date. Set the filter to point to Today. Once you do it you will only see records logged for today or empty view if there is nothing logged yet.
3. Add grouping by categories
Set grouping by categories and rearrange the order of groups so that the most frequent categories were in the top.
→ Open database menu (three dots in the database top right)
→ choose Group
→ choose category property from the list
→ make sure Hide empty groups toggle is disabled
→ rearrange categories in Visible groups section
Here you can also add minor changes like rename the view tab for “Today” and hide the database title. I would not recommend to set an icon to this page as it will eat some space and you will see less categories on mobile screen.
4. Make this page easy accessible on your phone
Option 1. Add this new page to Favourites. Thus you will see it in the left Notion menu.
Option 2. Add a widget pointing directly to this page to your mobile screen.
Result and some final notes
Now if you use this page to add a spending, you tap on “+” sign in a corresponding category (that’s why we set the most frequent to be on top) and see the new record with prefilled date and category. And you only fill the rest of properties — description, amount and probably some others.
In my case there is also a month report that is supposed to be linked for every spending. That’s why my filter not only contains a date pointing to Today but also has a link to current month report.
Here I describe in details the expense tracking system that I use
Once I have a new month started I update the filter to point to the new month report. Not to forget it I have a checker which reminds me to update the filter if add a spending for a new month without updating a month report link. Here is the template of the system that I use.
What about area? I mean this Personal vs Business expenses. If you have Area field like in the screenshots above you could create two pages for logging personal and business expenses separately and add two widgets to your phone screen. In this case those pages would have additional filter settings for Area property.
This approach with filters and grouping may be used for lots of other cases when you need to input some data to databases in Notion. It utilises the very cool Notion feature: Notion prefills properties with values set in filters and groups of the view that you add a new record through.
Hope this trick will help you to keep on track with your expenses in Notion.
If you are eager to master Notion database views you are welcome to join my Notion masterclass here.
