The Trip That Cost Twice What You Expected
You budgeted $3,000 for two weeks in Southeast Asia. You came back with $180 in your account and a vague sense that the souvenirs were the problem. They were not the problem. The problem was twelve small cash transactions per day — breakfast here, tuk-tuk there, temple entry, bottle of water, ATM fee, lunch — none of them large enough to remember individually, all of them adding up to a daily spend that was double your estimate.
A travel budget is not a pre-trip planning document. It is a daily accounting discipline that tells you, in real time, whether you are on track or not. The difference between knowing at day seven that you are AUD $200 over budget and knowing at day thirteen is the difference between adjusting your plans and overdrafting your account at the airport.
Transaction by Transaction, Category by Category
The Description multichoice — Deposit, Breakfast, Lunch, Tea, Souvenir, Travel, Entertainment, Groceries, Other — covers the categories that actually account for daily travel spending. Breakfast and Lunch as separate categories rather than a combined "Food" category reflects how travelers actually think about their days: the sit-down lunch at a tourist-area restaurant is a deliberate, visible spend; the roadside breakfast at 7 AM is a different calculation entirely.
Tea as a separate category is culturally specific and practically significant for Australian travel in Asia. A single bubble tea, milk tea, or fresh juice is AUD $2-5. Seven or eight of them across a long hot day in a city where you are walking between attractions adds up to a spend category that does not fit neatly under either Lunch or Groceries, and that disappears entirely if grouped under Other.
Souvenir as its own category is the tracking field that reveals the pattern most travelers want to deny. Every souvenir is a small, discretionary, memorable purchase. Across a two-week trip, the souvenir total is the number that surprises people at the end. Logging every purchase in real time, rather than attributing them to Other, is the only way to see it building.
Three Transaction Types for Three Spending Modes
EFT, Cash, ATM, Other — the transaction type tells you how money left your account. Cash transactions are the ones most likely to go unlogged because there is no electronic record to prompt you. ATM as a separate type captures the withdrawal event itself, which is the moment you need to record the amount in hand so that the subsequent cash spending makes sense in the register.
A trip where all spending is tracked by cash withdrawal (ATM) as the income event and daily category spending as the expenditure events gives you a complete cash register without requiring a receipt for every transaction.
The Total calculated field — #{income} - #{expenditure} — runs on every record individually, not as a running sum across the database. This means each record shows whether that specific transaction resulted in net income (a deposit) or net expenditure, rather than showing a cumulative balance. The running total across all records comes from the library-level aggregation, where sorting by date gives you the spending timeline and summing the Total field gives you the trip balance.
Deposits as an income category handle the reality that travel money management sometimes involves topping up from a linked account mid-trip, receiving a refund, or splitting costs with a travel companion who pays you back in cash. These inflows belong in the register alongside the outflows, and Income as a separate field from Expenditure ensures that a deposit does not get misrecorded as a negative expenditure.