Home › Help › Determining Average Expenses

Determining Average Expenses

Some things you buy don’t have a regular schedule. You may buy groceries once or twice a week, go out for dinner on a whim, or buy gas when your tank is nearing empty.

Claratii, however, still needs a schedule so it can create your projections. I like to use a weekly expense based on my last three months of spending.

Follow these steps to come up with the amount you should enter.

  1. Total up the amounts you actually spent on the expense in the last three months.
  2. Divide that total by 12 (there are about 12 weeks in three months).
With that number, I just need to create an expense. Here’s what I did for gas recently.

Example: Gasoline Expense

I use Mint.com to track my spending, so totaling up the last three months of gasoline charges is very simple. If you’re using your bank’s online check register or a paper check register, this may take you a little longer. Mint says that in the last three months, I spent $835.22 on gas.

So, on average my weekly gas spending was \frac{835.22}{12} = 69.60 dollars.

With that, I simply need to create a new expense called Gas for 69.60 which occurs every week starting next Sunday (the day of the week I find I most often buy gas):

Accuracy

The great thing about Claratii is that you don’t have to be spot in with your numbers or dates. The same applies to averaged expenses; this method does a good enough job and with that Claratii can make pretty good projections of your account balance. Try it out.

Questions and Feedback

Email us at feedback@claratii.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.