Expense Tracking

Why track expenses

Revenue alone does not tell you whether a product is worth building. A project generating $500/month while costing $400/month in hosting and APIs has a very different story than one with the same revenue and $20 in costs. Abner's expense tracking gives you the full picture.

Adding an expense

Go to Expenses in the sidebar and click + Add Expense. Fill in the following fields:

• Name — a label for the expense (e.g. "Cloud Run hosting", "Anthropic API")
• Vendor — optional, the company or service provider
• Amount (USD) — the cost in US dollars
• Category — used to group expenses in reports (see categories below)
• Recurrence — One-Time, Monthly, or Annual
• Date — the date the expense was incurred
• Project — which project this expense belongs to, or Shared (see below)

Expense categories

Categories help you understand where your money is going at a glance:

• Hosting & Infrastructure
• APIs & Services
• Developer Tools
• Marketing & Ads
• Domain & SSL
• Contractor / Freelancer
• Apple Developer Program
• Other

Recurring expenses

Mark an expense as Monthly or Annual if it recurs. Recurring expenses are automatically projected forward — you enter it once and Abner accounts for it every month.

Annual expenses (like the Apple Developer Program fee of $99/year) are amortized monthly in the P&L view — divided by 12 and spread evenly. This gives a more accurate monthly profit picture than a single large deduction in one month.

Shared expenses

Some costs apply to all your products. For example, the Apple Developer Program membership covers all your iOS apps, and a shared server might run multiple projects. Mark these as Shared when adding the expense.

Shared expenses are split equally across all your projects in P&L calculations. For example, if you have 4 projects and pay $99/year for the Apple Developer Program, each project is allocated $24.75/year ($2.06/month).

You can also configure a custom percentage split per project for shared expenses that are not evenly distributed.

Monthly cost calculation

The expense list shows a Monthly Cost column for each expense:

• Monthly expense — shown as-is
• Annual expense — divided by 12
• One-time expense — shown as a dash (not included in monthly totals)

The total at the bottom of the expense list shows your total monthly run rate — the minimum revenue each project needs to reach before it becomes profitable.

Editing and deleting expenses

Click any expense in the list to edit it. Click the delete icon to remove it. Deleting an expense will also remove it from historical P&L calculations.