VoiceSpend is a free expense tracker for iPhone that lets you log expenses, income, and transfers across unlimited accounts — personal, business, cash, credit card, or however you organise your money. No subscription required for any of that. The optional upgrade is voice AI: speak your expenses and the app extracts every detail automatically.
This guide walks through the full workflow — from setting up your accounts to reviewing AI-parsed entries, checking balances, and reading your spending reports.
Why use voice instead of typing?
Manual expense apps ask you to open a form, pick a category, type an amount, and save. That's four steps for something that happened in thirty seconds at the checkout. Most people skip it and forget.
- Faster capture. Speaking is faster than typing, especially for amounts and notes. "Lunch with client, 42 dollars, business" takes two seconds to say and logs three pieces of information at once.
- Fewer forgotten expenses. You can record while walking out of a shop, sitting in the car, or in the elevator after a client dinner — before the receipt disappears from your wallet and the amount disappears from memory.
- Multiple expenses in one recording. Say everything you spent without stopping. The AI separates each expense automatically.
- No form-filling. The AI assigns the category, account, and tag from context. You review and save — you don't build the entry from scratch.
Step 1: Set up your accounts
Accounts represent where your money lives or gets charged. Common examples: Savings Account, Credit Card, Cash, Payroll Account. You can create as many as you need — all free, no limit.
- Open VoiceSpend and tap Settings → Manage → Accounts.
- Tap Add Account. Give it a name, pick a currency, choose an icon and colour, and optionally enter a starting balance (useful if you're migrating from another app).
- Repeat for each account you want to track. Set one as your default — that's where voice entries land when you don't specify an account by name.
VoiceSpend seeds three accounts on first install (Credit Card, Savings, Payroll) to help you get started. Edit or delete them to match your real accounts.
Step 2: Record your expenses
Tap the green mic button at the bottom of the screen. VoiceSpend starts recording immediately. Speak your expenses naturally — you can log several in one recording without stopping.
"Spent 12 on lunch today" works just as well as "lunch 12 expense." Say the account name if the expense belongs somewhere specific: "coffee 4.50 personal credit card" or "transferred 500 from savings to credit card." The AI understands natural speech.
When you're done speaking, tap the mic button again to stop. VoiceSpend sends the audio to be transcribed and parsed. The recording is typically processed in under 30 seconds.
Step 3: AI organizes every entry
VoiceSpend doesn't just transcribe — the AI parses your speech into structured entries. For each expense or income it detects, it extracts:
- Amount — the number you said
- Transaction type — expense, income, or transfer
- Category — matched to your existing categories, or created on the fly if it's something new
- Account — matched to the account you named, or your default account
- Tag — Personal or Business (or any tag you've created), inferred from context
- Date — today by default, or whatever date you mentioned ("last Tuesday", "yesterday")
If the AI encounters a category it hasn't seen before, it creates it automatically. After saving, VoiceSpend shows you any new categories so you can rename or recolour them if you like.
Step 4: Review before saving
After processing, your parsed entries appear in the "Entries to Review" section on the Home screen. Each card shows the amount, type, category, account, and tag the AI assigned.
- Toggle entries on or off — deselect anything you don't want to save.
- Edit any field — tap a card to expand it. Change the amount, type, category, account, tag, notes, and date.
- Save in one tap — tap "Save X Entries" to commit everything selected at once.
- Discard all — if the recording didn't come out right, discard everything and try again. Nothing is saved until you explicitly tap Save.
Step 5: Check your balances
The Home screen shows a live running balance for each account — your starting balance plus all income minus all expenses. Tap any account to see its balance and this month's income and expense totals.
This is useful for reconciliation: open VoiceSpend, compare the balance to your actual bank app, and confirm your records match. If they don't, something was missed or entered incorrectly — a quick check each week catches it before it compounds.
Step 6: Manual entry (always free)
Voice AI is the upgrade, but manual entry is always free with no restrictions. In the Transactions tab, tap the + button in the top-right corner to open the manual entry form.
- Enter the amount and pick Expense, Income, or Transfer
- Choose a category (transfers skip this — pick a destination account instead)
- Assign a tag and add optional notes
- Pick the date — defaults to today
Manual entry is also how you edit a saved transaction later. Tap any entry in the Transactions list to reopen its form.
Step 7: Read your spending reports
The Reports tab shows your financial picture for any time period — monthly, a rolling 3-month window, yearly, or all time.
- Summary cards — total income, total expenses, and net balance for the selected period
- Category breakdown — a donut chart of your top spending categories, with a full list below it
- Tag filter — switch between Personal and Business to see each independently, or view everything together
- Budget progress bars — visible in Monthly + Expense view. Each budget shows how much you've spent against your limit, with colour-coded warnings as you approach or exceed it
Exporting your data
Go to Settings → Data to export at any time:
- Export as CSV — opens a spreadsheet with all your transactions. Import into Excel, Google Sheets, or any tool that reads CSV.
- Export Backup (JSON) — a full snapshot of your accounts, categories, tags, and all transactions. Use it to restore your data on a new device or after a reinstall.
iCloud sync handles day-to-day backup automatically — your data is stored in your personal iCloud container and restores on reinstall without any manual steps.
What's free and what requires a plan
Everything described in this guide — unlimited accounts, transactions, categories, tags, budgets, reports, CSV/JSON export, and iCloud sync — is free with no subscription required. The only gated resources are AI Minutes for voice entry and image analyses for receipts or statements.
- Free plan — 20 AI Minutes and 10 image analyses (lifetime). Enough to try the AI features and get a feel for how they work.
- Pro / Power plans — monthly AI Minutes and image analyses that reset every billing period. See the pricing page for current allowances and rates.
If you run out of AI allowances, the app keeps working — you can still add entries manually at no cost.
Start tracking in under two minutes
Download VoiceSpend, create your first account, and tap the mic. Say what you spent. Your first expense is logged before you leave the shop.
No subscription needed to start — and no subscription needed for most of what the app does. Voice AI is there when you want it.
