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Feature · Budget

What it costs
to teach at home.

Log a receipt in seconds, photo and all. The app keeps a tidy ledger by category and child, so you know what the year actually cost without rebuilding it from a shoebox in March.

no bank links - paper-style, on purpose

photo · receipts and a notebook on a kitchen table

Log a spend in seconds

Receipt in, ledger updated.

Tap Add spend, type the amount, pick a category, Books, Materials, Classes & clubs, Trips, Subscriptions, Other, and pick which child it was for, or mark it as the whole family. Snap the receipt with your phone if you want it saved alongside.

That is the whole form. Backdate when you remember, edit when you find a smaller charge, archive when something gets returned. There is no bank link, no automatic feed - paper-style, on purpose.

Year-to-date, at a glance

What the year has cost so far.

The Spend page shows a running total for the year, broken down by category, by child, and by term. Filter to the autumn term to remember what you spent on the Natural History Museum trip; filter to a single child to see what their gymnastics class added up to.

A small sparkline shows whether the month is running heavier or lighter than the same month last year. Useful as a quiet gut-check, never as a target.

Soft budgets, no finger-wagging

A quiet bar, not a notification.

Set an annual or monthly budget per category if it helps you plan. The Spend page shows a calm horizontal bar against your target - green while you have room, deeper when you are close, the same colour even past it. No red, no alerts, no email.

Skip budgets entirely if they are not your shape; the ledger works the same way.

Budget · 2025/26•••
Books£42.00
Field trips£18.00
Materials£64.00
Subscriptions£12.00

In the app

How it sits inside Willowfolio.

Six surfaces. None of them shout, all of them let you back out. The whole feature is hide-able from Settings → Modules if you do not need it.

  • Spend · Add spend button

    Add a spend

    Amount, category, child or family, optional photo of the receipt. Backdate or edit later.

  • Spend · Year-to-date tab

    Year-to-date totals

    Running total broken down by category, by child, and by term. Filter to a single term or child.

  • Spend · By category tab

    Soft budget bars

    Set an annual or monthly target per category. A calm horizontal bar, no red, no alerts.

  • Your week · Home page

    Recent spend strip

    A small line at the foot of the home page: this week's total, last week for context.

  • Account · Data export

    CSV export of the ledger

    Tidy table of date, amount, category, child, note, receipt URL. Drops straight into a spreadsheet.

  • Settings · Modules

    Turn the whole module off

    Spend tracking is optional. Hide it and the rest of the app does not change shape.

Common questions

The things families ask first.

Do you connect to my bank?
No. There is no Open Banking link, no automatic feed, no card import. Spend is added by hand the way you would write a paper ledger. We made that choice deliberately - a bank feed pulls in groceries, takeaways and everything else, and the cleanup costs more than the typing it saves.
Where do receipt photos live?
On the same private storage as your activity photos and council-report evidence. Receipts count toward your photo allowance, and you can delete one at any time without removing the spend itself. Nothing is shared outside your family unless you put it in a report.
Can I split costs by child?
Yes. Each entry has an optional per-child tag, so you can see what the year cost for one child versus another. For shared expenses across siblings, leave the tag off and it counts at the family level.
Can I track multiple currencies?
You can pick one currency per workspace. The default is GBP, with EUR and USD available for families abroad. Mixing currencies inside one ledger is not supported yet, because the conversion rates would always be a beat behind the truth.

Try it with real data

Know what the year actually cost.

The demo is a fully populated workspace you can poke around in. Real shapes, real flows, fictional family.