Insights: cash flow & findings

Insights (Finances → Insights) show you at a glance where your money comes from and where it goes – with key figures, a cash flow chart, a monthly report and automatic findings.

Shared or just me?

At the top, you switch between two views – each person in the household chooses their own, and the choice is remembered. Until you've chosen, Insights starts with Only me: it's the only view that's complete for you, because new expenses start out private and private expenses count as 0 in “Shared”. The tile on the Finances overview follows the same choice – so the tile and Insights always show the same figure.

• Shared: All shared-visible expenses and contracts count in full. Income appears as family shares – e.g. “Alex's share” (with that person's own first name), if they only share part of their salary for the household. The balance answers: do the shared income shares cover the shared-visible expenses?
• Only me: Your income in full, plus your share of shared expenses and contracts (for expenses that aren't shared, the full amount counts). Your personal savings rate.

If there are private expenses in your household, the “Shared” view is upfront about it: a note under the switch says exactly how many expenses in the chosen period count, and how many are private and therefore not included – with a direct link to “Only me”. If there are private contracts in the period, the note mentions those too: they also count as 0 in “Shared”. That's not a bug, it's the cost of privacy: patchio never shows anyone the total of someone else's private expenses, not even indirectly through a higher overall figure.

The budget card deliberately doesn't follow the view. A category budget counts what you're allowed to see – shared-visible expenses plus your own private ones, each at its full amount. That's neither the shared nor the personal figure, but a third one. That's why the card appears in the monthly view in both views, and its header says it's calculated from your own point of view. More on this under Budgets.

What you see

• Key figures: income, expenses (compared with your 3-month average), balance with savings rate and – for the current month – the forecast for month-end (known fixed costs + variable expenses so far + trend).
• Cash flow: from your income sources through the pot to fixed costs, top categories and surplus. With “Hide amounts”, you can show the structure without giving away the figures – handy for a family conversation. Clicking a category filters the entries list.
• Categories: every category, in full, with amount, bar and share – see below.
• Monthly report: top categories, outliers, the biggest single expense and new fixed costs – put together automatically.
• Findings: fixed-cost ratio, anything that stands out, contracts you could cancel, and a read on your savings rate. No advice – just your own figures, laid out clearly.

Categories at a glance

The cash flow chart only shows the biggest categories and bundles the rest into “Other”. Right below it, you'll therefore find the Categories section with the full list for the chosen period:

• Order: fixed costs first, then the variable categories from the biggest item down, with “No category” always last.
• Bar and percentage: the bar compares the row with the biggest category – so small items stay visible. The percentage next to it is the share of total expenses for the period.
• Comparison: in monthly view, the comparison on the right is with the previous month; in yearly view, with the previous year (for the current year, trimmed to the same stretch of months, so half a year isn't compared against a full one). “▲ +12%” means you spent more, “▼ −8%” means less. If the category didn't exist in the comparison period, it shows new instead of a percentage. In the “All time” period, there's nothing to compare – so the comparison is missing.

Tap a row and it expands (only one at a time):

• Key figures: the amount for the period, the average per month, and the most expensive month with its date.
• History: a small bar chart of just this category over recent months; the dashed line is the average. The history never reaches further back than the start month for Insights – months with no data would otherwise read as “nothing spent”.
• Entries: the three biggest entries for the period, plus a “See all entries” button – that filters the entries list further down to this category and jumps to it.
• For fixed costs, instead of the history you see the contracts that make up the fixed costs, with their amount for the period.

“Hide amounts” works here too: bars and percentages stay, the figures are covered.

Where do the figures come from?

Expenses and income come from your entries; fixed costs are calculated from your active contracts (from the contract's start date, or from when it was added to patchio) – spread monthly by default, or by due date if you prefer (see below). Settlement payments and the fixed-cost settlement don't count – those are just transfers, not spending. Income marked “Counts for the next month” (e.g. a salary paid on the 28th) is counted by Insights towards the following month.

Fixed costs: spread monthly or by due date

Below the view switch, Fixed costs lets you choose how your contracts feed into the figures:

• Spread monthly (default): each bill is spread across the months it covers. An annual bill of €120 shows up as €10 in each month, a quarterly bill at a third per month – handy for seeing what an average month costs you.
• By due date: each bill counts all at once in the month it's due. The €120 then appears entirely in that month and not at all in the other months. In the current month, whatever is still due before month end already counts; those dates are marked “due …” in the list of entries. The dates come from “Next due date” or the contract's start date plus its billing interval – using the same due-date rule as the preview on the Contracts page; contracts without a date count from the first of the month in which you added them. If you've matched a payment from a bank statement to a contract, the actual payment counts instead, with its real date and amount. If you change the next due date, past dates without a matched payment move to the new schedule as well.

Your choice is saved to your account and applies on all your devices. It applies to every figure in Insights, including the account balance, and to the tile on the Finances overview. If a contract runs unchanged for a full contract year, both views add up to the same total over that year; in the current year, or when a contract starts or ends mid-year, they differ. Settling shared fixed costs between you isn't affected.

Insights only from a start month

Contracts count from their real start date – often years before you started using patchio. That can make the trend and “All time” show months full of fixed costs that you otherwise never recorded anything for. To prevent that, Manage (section “Finances”, admins only) has the “Insights start from” limit: Insights completely ignores months before it, and a note above the key figures tells everyone from when it counts.

Good to know:

• The limit applies to the whole household – everyone sees the same figures.
• Only Insights filters. The expenses list, the balances (“who owes whom”) and the budgets don't know about the limit – that's real money, which mustn't disappear. (How a budget counts is covered under Budgets; it has nothing to do with the start month.)
• If someone later adds an entry dated before the limit, it shows up in the list and in the balance, but not in Insights – the note above the key figures counts such hidden entries too.
• The CSV export for the “from …” period only contains entries from the limit onward; the file name says so honestly (e.g. finanz-auswertung-ab-2026-04-gemeinsam.csv).

The CSV export

The CSV button in the entries list exports exactly what you're looking at – including the view you currently have selected. Because the same month is two different sets of figures in the two views, the view appears in two places in the file:

• in the file name, e.g. finanz-auswertung-2026-08-nur-ich.csv versus finanz-auswertung-2026-08-gemeinsam.csv – so the second export no longer overwrites the first;
• in the first line of the file (“View; …”), so you can still tell once it's long been renamed in your downloads folder. A blank line follows, then the table with the columns Date, Type, Description, Category, Payment date and Amount.