How Much Do You Actually Have?

Manual expense trackers are honest about one thing and evasive about another. They can tell you precisely what you spent, because you told them. What they've historically been unable to tell you is how much you actually have — because they only ever saw the money that moved after you installed the app.

So you get a Net Balance that says you're up for the month, sitting next to a real bank account with a completely different number in it, and the two never meet. The app isn't wrong; it's answering "what did you log" while you were asking "what have I got". Anyone who has used a budget app without bank linking for more than a few months has felt that gap.

The usual answer from the industry is to connect your bank. Hand over credentials to an aggregator, let it pull your balances, and the app finally knows your real position — at the cost of a third party holding read access to every transaction you've ever made, which is the exact trade a private expense tracker exists to avoid.

There's a much older answer, and it's the one Pocket Clear now uses: just tell it what was there when you started.

An opening balance per payment method

Every payment method you use — Cash, a card, UPI, a bank account, anything you've created — can now carry an opening balance: whatever was in that account before you started tracking it in Pocket Clear.

You set it in Settings › Manage Payment Types, in the field below the icon picker when you add or edit a payment type. The hint under it says exactly what it means: what was in this account before you started tracking. Added to everything you log.

It can be negative. That's not an edge case tolerated grudgingly — it's the point for a credit card you're carrying a balance on, or an account that starts overdrawn. A debt is a negative number, and a net position that can't represent one isn't a net position.

Balance by payment type

Set the Trends scope menu to All time and a card appears: Balance by payment type. For each method it shows its opening balance plus every transaction you've ever logged against it — what's in there now, rather than what moved during one period.

It only appears at All time, and that's deliberate — a running balance isn't a meaningful number for a single year. The Trends tab has its own scope menu, independent of whatever view period you use on the rest of Reports: pick a year to read that year's figures, or All time for the whole picture.

It won't match your Home balance, and that's correct

This is the first thing people notice, so it's worth saying before you see it rather than after.

Once you've set any opening balances, the total on this card will not add up to the Net Balance on your Home screen. Home reports what you've logged — income minus expenses. This card reports what you have. Compare the two and the difference is exactly the sum of your opening balances.

We could have hidden that by folding opening balances into Home's figures too, and it would have been worse. Home's balance is a statement about your activity in a period, and it's the number people use to answer "did I do all right this month". Adding a fixed lump to it would make a good month and a bad month look identical, and would silently change a number thousands of people already read a particular way. Two numbers that answer two questions honestly beat one number that blurs both.

One honest limitation for couples

The Balance by payment type card is always your own money only.

If you're linked in Partner Mode, it does not combine your balances with your partner's, and it ignores the Me / Partner / Combined selector entirely — even while the cards above it on the same tab are showing your combined figures. How much do I have is a personal question, so it's answered from your own transactions and your own opening balances however you're browsing the rest of Reports.

That's deliberate rather than unfinished. An opening balance is a private statement about a private account, and it shouldn't be silently summed into a household figure your partner never agreed to. Worth knowing before you read a number here and assume it covers both of you.

The other thing to know: it's undated

An opening balance has no date attached. It's simply added on top of everything you log against that payment method.

That's exactly right for the common case — set it once, before you've recorded much, and it becomes the starting point everything else builds on. It's exactly wrong if you add it after months of transactions already exist, because it will double-count that history. Pocket Clear warns you when you set a non-zero opening balance on a payment type that already has transactions, but the fix is yours: use the balance from before your earliest logged transaction, not today's.

One more: deleting a payment type takes its opening balance with it. Its transactions fold into the Unassigned row and the card's total drops by whatever that method's opening balance was. Correct — the account no longer exists in the app — but not something you want to find out afterwards.

Is this net worth?

Not in the full sense, and we're not going to call it that in the app. It's your cash position across the accounts you've told Pocket Clear about. It doesn't know about a house, a pension, or a brokerage you've never mentioned.

But for most people, most of the time, the question underneath "what's my net worth" is a much smaller one: what do I actually have right now, across everything, including what I owe on the card. That question now has an answer that took you one field per payment method and never asked you to connect anything.

Pocket Clear does also have a separate, optional Wealth beta that connects a brokerage read-only for people who want investments tracked automatically. It's opt-in and rolling out slowly, and it's a different feature with a different trade-off. Everything in this post asks for nothing — no login, no connection, no third party.

While you're on Trends

Two other things landed there in this release, both free. A Spending by category card now sits at the bottom of Trends at either scope — a year or all time — listing every category biggest-first with its share of the total, and each row taps through to the transactions behind it. And on the Monthly tab, tapping a slice of the category chart now shows that category's total and how much of the period's spending it accounts for — which on Android is the first time that chart has responded to a tap at all.

Setting it up

Settings › Manage Payment Types → tap a payment method → Opening balance. Then Reports › Trends → scope menu → All time. Ten minutes, once, and the app finally knows what it's working with.

Full details: Manage Payment Types and how Reports work.