Pocket Clear on the Web: Track on Your Phone, Review on Your Laptop

"Is there a web version?" is the most common reason people give for leaving Pocket Clear. Not price. Not a missing chart. Not bank linking. A laptop.

It shows up in support email, in one-star reviews, and — most tellingly — in the polite ones. Somebody logs faithfully on their phone for four months, sits down on a Sunday to actually look at the year, and finds that the only place their money exists is a five-inch screen. Then they go and find an app that has a browser tab.

Pocket Clear now has one. You sign in at web.pocketclear.app and everything you have logged is there, on a full-size screen, in a table you can sort and filter and page through.

Capture and review are two different jobs

The phone won the capture argument years ago and it was never close. You buy something, you have your phone in your hand, and thirty seconds later it is logged. No laptop competes with that, which is exactly why every serious tracker is phone-first now.

Review is the opposite. Reviewing a year of spending means holding a lot of rows in view at once — scanning, sorting by amount, noticing that one category is doing something odd, clicking into it, going back. That is a task built for a wide screen, a keyboard and a mouse, and it is genuinely miserable on a phone. Not impossible. Miserable.

For four years Pocket Clear was excellent at one half of that and had nothing at all to say about the other half. The web dashboard is the other half.

What it is: a reading and exporting tool

Here is the plain version, stated up front rather than discovered later: the web version is read-only. You cannot add a transaction on it. You cannot edit one. You cannot delete one. There is no Add button hidden behind a menu.

That is a deliberate choice for this first release, not an oversight, and it comes from the same place as most decisions in this app. Your phone is where your data is created and changed. Keeping it that way means there is exactly one authoritative copy, no second editing surface to reconcile against it, and no way for a browser tab left open on a hotel computer to lose or duplicate a transaction. Editing on the web is not something we have ruled out forever — it is simply not what this version does, and I would rather say so in the first paragraph than let you find out by hunting for a button that does not exist.

What it does do is the thing people were actually asking for. Sort thousands of transactions. Filter them the way you filter them on your phone. Read them at a size where reading is pleasant. Then have the file emailed to you.

Signing in

You type the email address on your Pocket Clear account and we send you a six-digit code, the same way the app does. There is no password, because there has never been a password.

Sign-up stays in the app. The web will not create an account for you. If you have not installed Pocket Clear yet, the sign-in page gives you store links and a QR code and points you at your phone. This keeps one door into the product rather than two, and it means the account you sign into on a laptop is always an account that already has data behind it.

A browser stays signed in while you keep using it and goes quiet after three days of being left alone, so a tab you forgot about on a shared laptop does not stay open indefinitely. Signing out ends it immediately.

One more thing worth knowing because it looks like a bug if nobody tells you: you are signed in on one browser at a time. Signing in on a new one signs the old one out, and signing out signs out every browser at once. Your phone is not affected either way — it stays signed in regardless of what you do in a browser.

The table

The centre of the page is a spreadsheet-style table of your transactions. Sorting by date or amount is in the table header. Paging is at the bottom. It is built to be scrolled through, not admired — this is the screen where you find the thing you are looking for.

The filter bar mirrors the one on All Transactions in the app, on purpose, so that a filter you already know how to build on your phone is the same filter here:

• Money in, money out, or transfers.
• Categories and subcategories.
• Payment types.
• A minimum and a maximum amount.
• A search across your notes.

If you are linked in Partner Mode, the Me / Combined / Partner switch is there too, and it behaves exactly as it does on your phone. A couple who has been keeping a combined view on two phones can finally put that combined view on a screen big enough to read it.

Dates work by the calendar here, and that is on purpose

This is the one place where the web deliberately does not match the app, so it is worth explaining rather than glossing over.

The web offers plain calendar ranges: this calendar month, last calendar month, the last 30 or 90 days, this year, or any two dates you pick. It does not use the view period or the period start day you have set on your phone.

The reason is structural. Those are device-local settings — they live on the phone and they are not part of what syncs. So if you run a semi-monthly period, or your month starts on the 25th because that is when you get paid, "this month" on the web and "this month" in the app are two different windows, and the web has no way to know which one you meant.

Rather than guess and be quietly wrong, the web asks you to be explicit. Pick two dates and both surfaces agree exactly. It is a small friction that buys you a number you can trust, which is the right trade in a tool whose entire job is showing you accurate totals.

For the same reason, money you have set aside into a savings goal is shown as its own figure on the web instead of being folded into Money Out. Whichever way you like to count it, the number is on screen.

Exporting

The export buttons produce CSV and PDF, using the same export the app uses, with whatever filters you have on screen applied. Filter down to one category for one quarter, hit export, and that is what you get.

The file arrives by email, usually within about three minutes, at the address on your account. Nothing downloads directly out of the table. That is how export has always worked in Pocket Clear and the web did not change it.

One honest gap: the note search is not carried into the export. Every other filter is. The page tells you so on screen when you have a search typed, rather than silently sending you a file with more rows in it than you were looking at.

Why it needs Pro with Cloud Sync — and why that is not a pricing decision

The web needs Cloud Sync turned on, which in turn means Pro. I want to be precise about why, because "this feature is Pro" and "this feature is impossible without Pro" are different statements and only one of them is true here.

On the free tier, Pocket Clear never uploads anything. Not a stripped-down copy, not a backup, not an anonymous total. Your transactions are written to your phone and that is where they stay. It is the reason a free Pocket Clear works on a plane, in a basement, and in a country where you would rather not hand your spending to anybody.

Which means that when a free-tier user opens a browser and signs in, there is genuinely nothing on our side to show them. Not an empty table — an empty everything. No amount of engineering makes a browser render data that was never sent to us. A web dashboard is not something we chose to put behind the sync wall; it is something that only exists on the far side of it.

Turn Cloud Sync on and a copy of your data does go to our servers, where it sits encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. We operate those servers and we hold that key — I am not going to dress that up as something cleverer than it is. That is the trade you make when you ask for your data on a second device, and it is the same trade you already made the day you turned sync on to get your phone and your tablet to agree.

So the web dashboard tells you which of the three states you are in, in words, instead of showing you a blank grid: signed out, Pro needed, or Cloud Sync is off. The last one is the one that would look most like a broken app, so it says exactly that and tells you where the switch is.

Where to find it

On your phone, open Settings and tap Open Pocket Clear on the web. Or type the address into a browser on the laptop you are already sitting at, which is presumably how you got here.

The full walkthrough — every filter, both export formats, and each message you might run into — is in the help centre: Pocket Clear on the web.

What this does and does not close

It closes the biggest gap in the product. People who track on a phone and review on a laptop no longer have to choose between the app that is pleasant to log in and the app that is pleasant to read.

It does not make Pocket Clear a web app, and I am not going to pretend otherwise for a launch post. Adding, editing, budgets, groups, reports, widgets — all of that is still the phone, and the phone is still the point. What the browser gives you is the wide screen, at the moment you actually want a wide screen, which is once a month or once a quarter when you sit down to look at where the money went.

If you have been holding off on Pocket Clear because there was no way to see your own history on a real screen — that reason is gone.