Expenses

Logs, splits, categorizes and reports spending — daily expenses, shared costs, reimbursements, receipts, project and trip budgets. Use when the user paid for something and wants it recorded, when a bill has to be split and someone told what they owe, when a group trip or shared flat needs settling up, when a client owes money back and the claim has to be assembled, when they ask where their money went or why a category jumped, when a renovation, wedding or trip budget needs a remaining number, when something was paid in another currency, when a refund, deposit or duplicate charge has to be booked, or when the log no longer matches the card statement. Not for net worth or debt planning (personal-finance-tracker), zero-based budgeting (zero-based-budgeting), subscription inventories (subscriptions), issuing invoices (invoice), OCR archiving of supplier invoices (invoices), payment software (billing), or bookkeeping (accountant).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/expenses/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/expenses/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — that index is the list of files; never work from a list of names memorized here, because most boxes get created after this skill was written. Read ~/Clawic/data/finances/ before any question about budgets, recurring charges, or which account something was paid from. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it. If data sits at an old location (~/expenses/ or ~/clawic/expenses/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/expenses/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens.

Write before the session ends whenever it produced something durable: an expense, a refund or a deposit; a split and the balances it moved; a settlement; a claim that changed status; a category or vendor rule; a budget envelope or its burn; a month close or a reconciliation pass; or something the user will want to read again — a settlement statement, a month or tax-year report, a written policy. memory-template.md has every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

What belongs to other skills' boxes, not to this one. Recurring charges, payment accounts and cards, and the household budget go to the shared ~/Clawic/data/finances/ (subscriptions.md, accounts.md, budget.md) — one row per item, amounts carrying their currency, so the same numbers answer whoever asks. People you split with go to ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md; here they appear as a name only. Trip bookings already recorded in ~/Clawic/data/bookings/ are read, never re-entered — the locator lives there, the money lives here. Formats and the full write protocol travel in memory-template.md, because the user may have none of those skills installed.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. Store the pointer and strip the value: keychain:amex-personal, 1password:Personal/Chase/login, env:PLAID_TOKEN. Card numbers, CVVs, PINs and banking logins are never data; the last four digits and the card's nickname are.

Money tracking dies from friction, not from bad math. Record the entry in one line, name the number, and stop. Never open with an interview about how they want to track things: log what they just said, use the defaults, and let the shape emerge from the entries. Report numbers with their currency and their as-of date, and never wrap a total in an opinion about the spending. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: currency, locale, country) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• Recording spending as it happens: an amount, a vendor, a category, a payment method, a receipt
• Shared money: splitting a bill, a flat, a trip or a household, tracking who owes whom, and settling up
• Getting money back: employer reimbursement claims, per diems, mileage, client-rebillable costs
• Deciding whether something is a deductible business expense and what evidence it needs to survive
• A bounded budget — renovation, wedding, trip, launch — that needs a remaining number and an early warning
• Answering "where did it go": month closes, category trends, variance against budget, tax-year packs
• Act-as mode: this skill maintains the ledger itself. It does not advise on investing, debt payoff, or net worth (personal-finance-tracker), and does not run a budgeting methodology (zero-based-budgeting)

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"I just paid €12 for lunch"	One line, six fields, into this month's ledger box; no follow-up questions	capture.md
Weeks of receipts piled up unlogged	Backfill by statement, not by memory; mark reconstructed entries as such	capture.md
Cash keeps vanishing from the log	Count the wallet, book the difference as one cash-unlogged entry	capture.md
"What category is this?" / misc is bloating	The decision test, then a vendor rule so it is never asked twice	categories.md
Split the dinner / the flat / the trip	Who paid vs who benefited are two fields; then the balance table	sharing.md
"Who owes who, and how do we settle?"	Net the balances, then minimize transfers — never pay round-robin	sharing.md
Work owes me money	Claim packet, policy limits, submission deadline, status ladder	reimbursement.md
Per diem or mileage instead of receipts	Rate × units, and which receipts stop being needed	reimbursement.md
"Can I deduct this?"	Business purpose test, mixed-use apportionment with a stored basis	business.md
Rebilling a cost to a client	At cost or with markup, and which tax rides on it	business.md
Receipt handling, or one went missing	Naming, retention clock, tax invoice vs card slip, the missing-receipt note	receipts.md
Renovation/wedding/trip budget	Envelope with contingency; committed money counts before it is paid	budgets.md
"Are we over budget?"	Burn rate against elapsed share, not against calendar feel	budgets.md
Spending on a trip, several currencies	Daily burn, trip envelope, per-person share, post-trip summary	travel.md
Paid in a foreign currency	Three fields — original, rate, rate date — and which rate is correct	currency.md
Log does not match the card statement	Match by amount+date window; classify each gap before fixing any	reconciliation.md
CSV export from a bank to import	Column mapping, sign convention, dedupe key, pending rows	reconciliation.md
Month end, quarter end, tax year end	Close sequence, variance, what to surface unprompted	reports.md
Refund, chargeback, deposit, duplicate charge	Negative entry against the original month and category (Rule 5)	capture.md
Anything else about spending	Answer with the number, its currency and its as-of date, then write the entry to its box	—

Coverage map: capture.md getting entries in · categories.md the taxonomy · receipts.md evidence and retention · sharing.md split and settle · reimbursement.md claiming from an employer · business.md deductibility and rebilling · budgets.md bounded envelopes · travel.md trip spending · currency.md foreign money · reconciliation.md matching against the bank · reports.md closes and analysis.

Core Rules

1. Log now, complete later; never the reverse. An entry is six fields — date, amount with currency, vendor, category, payer, payment method. A field you do not have is written as unknown and the entry still goes in. The entry that waits for perfect data is the entry that never exists, and a log with gaps is worth more than a log with holidays.
2. Transaction date, not posting date. Card charges post 1-3 days after the purchase, and a purchase on the 30th that posts on the 2nd silently moves a month's total. Store the date the money was committed; keep the posting date only when reconciling (reconciliation.md).
3. Every amount carries its currency, in the value. 62 USD, never $62 — the ledger will hold three currencies before the year is out and $ is ambiguous across at least four of them. A foreign entry stores three fields, always: original amount with its currency, the rate as home-per-unit-foreign, and the rate date. Home amount = original × rate: 8,400 JPY at 0.0062 EUR/JPY = 52.08 EUR. Storing only the converted number destroys the entry the first time someone asks what the actual price was (currency.md).
4. Who paid and who owes are different fields. One expense, two facts: the payer bears the cash, the beneficiaries bear the cost. Invariant after every shared entry: the net balances of a group sum to zero. If they do not, one split is wrong — find it before adding anything else (sharing.md).
5. A refund is a negative entry, not income. Book it against the original month and the original category, referencing the original entry. Booked as income it inflates two numbers at once: the category total stays wrong forever and the month looks like it earned money. Same for a returned deposit — a deposit is a receivable when paid and a zero when returned, never a category expense.
6. Never compare a month-to-date number against a closed month. Every stored total carries an As of date; a total whose as-of is not the last day of its period is partial and gets labeled as such in every sentence that reports it. Elapsed-share comparison instead: 1,400 EUR by day 12 of a 30-day month projects ~3,500 EUR, which is the number worth reacting to.
7. Categories are stable or every comparison is a lie. Renaming or resplitting a category applies retroactively across the whole history in the same turn, or it does not happen. The test for a new category is whether its number would change a decision; if not, it is a tag. other above ~5% of monthly spend means the taxonomy is broken, not that the month was unusual (categories.md).
8. Evidence is captured at payment or lost. At or above receipt_threshold an entry is incomplete without a receipt pointer, and a business or reimbursable entry additionally needs the business purpose written at the time — reconstructing purpose months later is the part that fails an audit, not the amount (receipts.md).

Output Gates

Before delivering a number, a settlement, a claim or a report:

• Does every amount carry its currency, and does every foreign entry carry original, rate and rate date (Rule 3)?
• Is any total I am reporting a mix of month-to-date and closed periods (Rule 6)?
• After a shared entry or a settlement, do the group's net balances still sum to zero (Rule 4)?
• Did everything durable from this session land in its box — and did any new box get its ## Boxes line in the same turn?
• Did I strip every card number, PIN, login and token from anything pasted in, leaving a <kind>:<locator> pointer in its place?
• Did I report the number without an opinion attached to it?

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/expenses/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
home_currency	text (ISO 4217)	profile.yaml currency, else USD	Currency every total, budget and report converts to; entries always keep the currency actually paid alongside (Rule 3)
tax_year_start	text (MM-DD)	01-01	Boundary of the business year in reports.md and the start of the retention clock in receipts.md
receipt_threshold	number (home currency)	75	Amount at or above which an entry is flagged incomplete without a receipt pointer (Rule 8)
close_day	number (1-28)	1	Day the previous month is closed and reported; writes the recurring row in the ## Due table
settle_cadence	week | month | trip | on_request	month	How often shared balances are netted and a settlement statement is offered (sharing.md)
default_split	equal | by_income | custom	equal	Split applied when the user names people but not proportions (sharing.md)
budget_alert_pct	number (50-100)	80	Share of an envelope at which spend is flagged unprompted, including committed-but-unpaid money (budgets.md)
mileage_rate	number (home currency per km or mi)	none	Rate used to turn distance into money; while unset, say that the jurisdiction's official rate for the year must be checked before quoting one (reimbursement.md)
private_categories	list	none	Categories excluded from any shared, exported or household-level report; their totals fold into other

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — how entries arrive (dictated in chat, a running inbox file, bank CSV import, receipt photos) and whether imports are trusted without review — affects capture.md and reconciliation.md
• Conventions — category naming style, tag scheme for projects and trips, ledger cut (month vs week), file naming for receipts — affects categories.md and receipts.md
• Platform — jurisdiction and its retention and receipt rules, locale and date format, distance unit, which cards and accounts exist — affects business.md, receipts.md and reimbursement.md
• Safety posture — what may leave the machine, which categories are private, whether balances are shown to a group or only to the user — affects reports.md and sharing.md
• Output format — report verbosity, whether every answer carries a trend line, register (numbers-only vs commentary) — affects reports.md
• Cadence — month close day, settlement rhythm, claim submission day, tax quarter dates, budget review — affects the ## Due table
• Split policy — standing rules per group (rent by room size, groceries equal, one person always fronts) — affects sharing.md

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Designing the category system before logging anything	Two weeks of design, zero entries, and the categories turn out wrong anyway because they were guessed	Log flat for two weeks, then derive categories from what actually appeared (categories.md)
Splitting round-robin — everyone pays everyone	A five-person trip settles in up to 20 transfers, so nobody finishes and the balances rot	Net first, then minimize: any group of n settles in at most n−1 transfers (sharing.md)
Booking a refund as income	The category total is now wrong in both directions and the month reads as profitable	Negative entry against the original month and category (Rule 5)
Converting a foreign amount and keeping only the result	The original price is gone, so a disputed charge cannot be matched and the rate cannot be audited	Store original, rate, rate date (Rule 3, currency.md)
Reconstructing business purpose at tax time	Amounts survive reconstruction; purpose does not, and purpose is what is actually challenged	Write the purpose in the entry at payment (Rule 8, business.md)
Treating a project budget as spent-so-far	Signed quotes and deposits are already committed; the envelope is gone before the cash is	Track committed and paid separately (budgets.md)
Accepting the terminal's offer to charge in your home currency	Dynamic currency conversion embeds a markup, commonly 3-7%, on top of the card's own FX	Always pay in the local currency (travel.md)
Waiting for the full receipt pile before claiming	Employer claim windows expire, commonly 30-90 days; an expired claim is a donation	Submit on close_day cadence, partial packets included (reimbursement.md)
One "shared" category for a couple or a flat	It answers how much was spent but never who owes whom, which is the only question that gets asked	Payer plus beneficiaries per entry (Rule 4)
Recategorizing history "from now on"	Every month-over-month comparison across the boundary is silently invalid	Retroactive across the whole history, or not at all (Rule 7)
Importing a bank CSV without a dedupe key	The same coffee appears three times across three imports and the month is unusable	Dedupe on date + amount + last four of the account (reconciliation.md)
Guilt framing on a total	The user stops logging, which costs more than any single category ever did	Report the number and the trend; the judgment is theirs

Where Experts Disagree

• Granular vs broad categories. Broad (8-15) survives years and gets maintained; granular answers questions broad cannot ("coffee", "kids' activities"). The frontier is decision value: split a category only when its own number would change a behavior, and use tags for everything else you want to slice by later (categories.md).
• Log everything vs log what matters. Complete logs enable reconciliation and audits; partial logs (over a floor, say 10 units of home currency, plus all business and shared spend) survive longer because they cost less. A user who needs tax evidence or shared settlement has no choice — those must be complete; discretionary personal spend can run on a floor.
• Split by income vs split equally. Equal is defensible and frictionless; proportional is fairer when incomes differ by more than roughly 2×, and it is the standing rule that most often goes unwritten and then gets relitigated. Whichever is chosen, write it down as a group rule before the first disagreement, not during it (sharing.md).
• Cash tracking. One school logs every cash purchase; the other withdraws a fixed amount, treats the withdrawal as spent, and never itemizes it. The second is more honest about what people actually sustain — but it destroys category data for the cash portion, which matters for anyone whose deductible spend is partly cash.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/expenses (install if the user confirms):

• personal-finance-tracker — net worth, cashflow and debt, which read these totals as input
• subscriptions — the recurring-charge inventory in the shared finances/ box
• invoice — issuing invoices to clients, where rebillable costs end up
• accountant — bookkeeping, financial statements and tax filing beyond expense evidence
• travel-planning — the trip itself; this skill covers what the trip costs

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Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/expenses.