The easiest message just includes an amount and a location.

All of your spending decisions fall into one of these rating buckets:

Many other tags are recognized, including the following:

Often the best spending decision is to buy nothing at all. If you want to make note of avoiding a specific purchase, you can use the “nospend” keyword or an amount of zero.

When you avoid spending for an entire day, use the “#nospend” tag.

This is optional, but can be helpful to learn how you might spend differently with various payment methods.

Add the hashtag that seems most appropriate.

Id you record spending on the same day you spent it, you don't have to do anything because entries default to “today.” But if you forget to record a transaction, you can indicate a different date using common formats.

For example, you could indicate May 4th, 2023 with any of these formats:

You can also use these tags for convenience:

You can add a description of what you bought. Anything that's not a hashtag or a recognizable date ends up as a comment. The idea is to help you remember what you bought when you review your spending.

You can also designate a spending category with arbitrary tags. Use the term that makes the most sense to you.

It's easy to spend more money than you should when it feels like you've encountered special circumstances. These two tags help you determine what “special circumstances” ought to be better accounted for in your budget:

The following tags can be useful to characterize your spending:

The more details you record about your spending, the more useful your spending journal will be.