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Reports

The picture the individual modules cannot show you.

Three questions, three reports.

Spending looks backwards, commitments look forwards, and usage covers the meters that have nothing to do with money. They are separate reports because reading them together would mislead you.

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The problem

Each module answers its own question well and none of them answers the question across modules. Spending sits in expenses, bills, fuel and split shares at once; a bill that has not been paid is a commitment rather than a cost; and units and kilometres are not money at all. Add them up naively and you double-count.

The approach

Reports reads the records you already have and groups them by calendar month. Everything you spend — a direct expense, a bill payment, a fuel fill, a car service, your share of a split — lands in one spending ledger tagged with where it came from, so a cross-module total needs no guesswork and can never count the same money twice.

What is inside

Three reports, deliberately not one

They are separate views rather than one long scroll because they are read at different moments, and mixing them makes both harder to read — a forward-looking commitment sitting between two backward-looking spend charts invites you to add them together.

Spending

Where the money actually went.

A backward-looking view of everything you have spent, over one month or up to twelve, broken down by category and by which part of the app it came from.

  • Monthly totals across this month, three, six or twelve months.
  • A breakdown by category, and a breakdown by source — how much of the month was direct spending, bill payments, vehicle costs and split shares.
  • Money you lent is deliberately excluded: lending is not spending, so the ledger keeps its own separate figure.

Commitments

What is already locked in.

The forward-looking half. Recurring bills that have not been paid yet are obligations rather than costs, so they get their own report instead of being mixed into a total that would then be wrong in both directions.

  • What is due, over the same month windows as the spending report.
  • Kept apart from spending on purpose — a commitment sitting between two spend charts invites you to add them together and count every bill twice.

Usage

The meters that are not money.

Electricity units consumed and distance driven, over the same months. Both are derived from consecutive readings, which is the only way either figure can be produced at all.

  • Units used per month, from your meter readings.
  • Distance covered per month, from your odometer readings.
  • Nothing here is converted into a cost — a unit is a unit.
What it does

Key capabilities

Everything listed here is built and in use in Reports today.

  • Three separate reports

    Spending, commitments and usage, switched between rather than stacked, because they are read at different moments and answer different questions.

  • Month by month

    Every figure sits in a calendar month, over this month, three months, six months or twelve.

  • Where the money came from

    A spending total shows how much came from each part of the app, so an expensive month is explainable rather than just expensive.

  • Charts and comparisons

    Month-over-month columns and category breakdowns, sized for a phone first.

  • PDF export

    Any report exports as a formatted PDF and goes straight to the share sheet.

  • Read-only by design

    There is nothing to create here. A report is a view of records that live elsewhere, so it has no add button and cannot be edited into disagreeing with them.

In practice

A typical workflow

Step through it — each step shows where you are in the flow.

Reports · step 1 of 4

Use the app normally

Every figure in a report is derived from the records behind it and no report stores a number of its own. A corrected expense corrects the report; there is no second copy to go stale.
Details

What it is like to live with

The things that decide whether a module still helps after a year of real use.

On a phone

The three reports are a segmented control at the top rather than a long scroll, so a phone never asks you to scroll past a chart you did not want. Charts resize to the screen instead of shrinking a desktop layout.

Your data

Reports are computed on your device from your own records. Nothing is uploaded to produce them, and no figure leaves your device unless you export a PDF and share it yourself.

Read the privacy detail

Good to know

  • Lending money is not counted as spending, and an unpaid bill is not counted as a cost. Both have their own place.
  • A fuel fill and a bill payment are already expenses, so they are counted once, not once per module.
  • Reports is read-only: it has nothing to add, edit or delete.

Try Reports in LifeRoster.

Open the app on web, Android or iOS. Everything works offline, and syncs when you are back online.

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