How to track expenses in Switzerland?

Tracking vs budgeting

For me, tracking expenses is much more essential than budgeting itself. Tracking expenses simply means knowing how much we spent in a given month (or another timeframe). Whether you put these expenses in different categories or not only matters to you. Budgeting means assigning limits to each category of your expenses. But once you have tracked all your expenses, it should be easy to know where you can improve.

But many people think is it is too time-consuming to track all their expenses. There are some ways to make it easier and more accurate.

Application for tracking

We should start at the beginning. Where should you track your expenses? There is no right or wrong answer here. What matters is that the tool you are using works for you. Overall, I think you should not pay for a budgeting app. There are many free apps and alternatives.

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When you are starting to track your expenses, the simplest way to start is to use a spreadsheet. And you do not have to pay for Microsoft Office, because there are some free open-source alternatives. So, you can use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, for instance. But if you prefer, you can totally use Excel or Numbers or put the spreadsheet on Google Sheets.

You only need a spreadsheet editor. Most people can get started by themselves, but if you do not know where to start, you can check out our simple spreadsheet or our advanced spreadsheet.

The advantage of these spreadsheets is that they are simple to get started with, but they still allow a lot of customization. And you can add advanced features as well.

Additionally, there are many budgeting apps available. I do not have a real recommendation here. I would recommend avoiding paid apps since there are many free apps available. I built my own for my needs (budget warrior), but it is difficult to install. Recently, I have heard some good things about MoneyManager Ex, but never tried it myself. One feature that can be very useful is to be able to import your expenses through CSV. We will see later that this is the favored file format for expenses.

And finally, you can also do it on paper. This is probably what takes the most time of all the techniques. And you have to be more careful about how you store your paper notes. But it works well and forces you to do a little math, which is good for the brain.

I started with an Excel sheet on my computer. Then, I migrated to Google Sheets. And finally, I wrote my own application and have been using it for about 13 years now.

Tracking card expenses

When you buy something with your debit card or credit card, it will be recorded in an application. This makes it easy to then record into your budget application because you cannot forget it.

There are two strategies to keep track of these expenses. Some people copy expenses from their card applications into their budget application very often (daily, often). This means they have to spend a little time with their budget every day. And some other people prefer to do it only once a month. In this case, you spend more time, but only once a month.

The strategy you choose should work for you. I do not think any of these two strategies has any significant advantage over the others. Personally, I prefer to do it once a month.

How long you will spend with your importing will depend on two factors:

• How fast you are to enter data into your budget application.
• How many expenses do you make per month.

So, if you want to save time, you can either spend less often or learn to use your application faster.

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If you would like to save more time, you should try to automatically import expenses into your budget application.

Unfortunately, in Switzerland, we are far behind many other countries in terms of exporting and importing data from banking applications. In the US, for instance, there are tools that will automatically connect to your bank account and extract all expenses and put them into a budget. In Switzerland, we are stuck with older tech.

The only thing you can do to automate your expenses is to go through CSV files. A CSV file is a comma-separated-value file. It is an old file format to represent tables from spreadsheets. It works really well for expenses.

First, you must check whether your budget application can import expenses from CSV. If it cannot, there is not much you can do. You can ask the authors of the application to add this feature. Or you can switch to another application. If you are using any spreadsheet application, it should be fairly easy to import CSV data (copy into a new sheet, rearrange, and copy into the expense sheet).

Then, the main problem arises. You also need to check whether you can export data from where you are spending. And this is where it can begin to be complicated because not all applications are equal. You can almost always get a PDF statement, but not always a CSV statement.

Our primary bank, Migros Bank, lets you generate CSV statements for the transactions of a given period. However, most people use a credit card to spend (to get cashback). My favorite credit card is the Certo One card by Cembra. This card is great, and we can export CSV transactions from the web app!

I also sometimes use TWINT which does not support it.

If you are lucky, both your bank and your credit card let you generate CSV statements. If you are not, only one of them lets you do this. So, in this case, you will have to choose between convenience and cashback.

If you only have PDF statements, there is still something you can do. There are some online services that let you convert a PDF statement into a CSV table. However, this will still require you to clean up the output CSV. It is not difficult, but it is still multiple extra steps. And some statements will work better than others.

For instance, I used Zamzar to convert PDF statements from Cembra to CSV in the past. I then have to remove some lines from the file and merge multiple tables to then be able to import it. You can also use AI for this. I have used ChatGPT, and at least the latest ChatGPT 4o model did not have any issues transforming the PDF to a single CSV file. In the past, it did not work so much, but this was on an older and smaller model.

This is an area where the Swiss banking system still needs to do a lot to make it easier for people to track their expenses.

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Many of the recent digital banks give you some reports on your expenses and let you categorize expenses into categories. For instance, with Neon, you can see your incoming and outgoing transactions and put them in different categories. You then have some limited reporting on where your money is going.

So, why not use this application directly? The main reason is that most people spend money in different form:

• Debit card
• Credit card
• Cash
• TWINT
• And possibly others

Since each app only has the knowledge about its own transactions, it does not make sense to use your banking application as a budget tracker. Another reason is that expense tracker applications are better at doing this than banks. There is a trend that bank applications try to do everything. But I strongly believe that no bank can do it all. A bank application should do banking only. I do not believe in the myth of the super app or universal bank. One bank cannot be great at everything.

Therefore, unless you strictly only use one mean of payment, using your banking application for tracking your expenses is not possible or interesting.

Tracking cash expenses

Cash expenses are probably the most complicated to track. Indeed, if you buy something in cash, it is easy to forget about it and never track it.

There are a few strategies on how to improve that so that your tracking is better. The first strategy is obvious: avoid cash payments. Everything you do on a credit card or debit card will be recorded by the app, and you do not need to remember it. Of course, some people are against card payments and is there is the issue that they are pricier for the stops (which ultimately makes them more expensive for customers).

Another strategy is to make sure you keep the receipts on you for each cash payment. Once you go home, you either note down the expenses or save the receipts for later. If you do not get a receipt, you can write it down on a small notepad you could carry on you at all time. And again, at the end of the day, you either store your note or write down the expense in your system.

The last strategy is quite different. If you would rather not keep track of each cash payment, you can consider that all cash withdrawn is spent. So, if you withdraw 200 CHF in cash, you can write down the expense as 200 CHF directly. This is less accurate because you do not know exactly how you will spend it. But you know this amount has left your bank account, and you are going to spend it. This is the simplest of the 3 strategies but will not accurately represent your expenses. On the other hand, this is simple and will accurately represent what leaves your account.

I also struggle with cash payments. And I use a mix of the three strategies. I try to avoid cash payments as much as possible. Then, if possible, I keep the receipts for later. And in some cases, for instance when going to a small market, I simply write down the total cash as one expense because in a small market you can only pay cash, and you do not get receipts.

What to do with the data?

Now that you have collected all this data about your expenses, what should you do about it? Data is good, but it is still useless if you do not make something out of it.

The first thing I recommend you do is compute your savings rate. Your savings rate is simply your net income divided by your savings (your net income minus your expenses). This important financial metric tells you how much of your income you are saving. It is a good metric to try to increase. When you are starting to improve your personal finances, lowering your expenses can have a very significant impact on your savings rate.

Then, you can look at trends in your expenses. By trends, I mean how you your finances are evolving? Are you spending more or less each month? Which category is improving or getting worse? These questions will help you figure out how to improve your expenses.

Of course, the best thing you can do with expenses is to reduce them. If you can spend less (without detriment to your quality of life, ideally), it will help your finances. If you do not know where to get started, you can check out my best tips to save money in Switzerland.

For many people, tracking expenses and having a global view over what they spend is enough. For others, it is necessary to set a budget. There are multiple strategies, and they do not work for everybody. But if you do not know where to get started, you can check the main budgeting methods and choose the one that fits you best.

Conclusion

As of writing this article, I have been tracking my expenses accurately for about 13 years. As a result, I now have a wealth of data to see where my expenses are going and see how I can improve them. I believe tracking my expenses has been one of the important factors in how I significantly improved my finances over the last decade.

If you are not yet tracking your expenses and struggle with your finances, I strongly encourage you to start tracking your expenses today.

How about you? How do you track your expenses?