The Cash Book Manifesto: Calm Money, Honest Numbers

Most money apps are dashboards that want to be feeds. Cash Book is a cash book with good manners.

Here is what that means, in terms you can hold us to.

Logging costs seconds, not attention

If recording a coffee takes longer than drinking it, the tool has failed.

So a day of spending should cost one sentence out loud. A bill should cost one photo. A card tap should cost nothing at all, which is the entire reason the Apple Pay automation exists, and a typed entry should be over in three taps. Anything slower than that is a bug wearing a nicer name, and it gets rebuilt.

We would rather you talked to the app than typed into it. That is a strange thing to say about a keypad we spent weeks designing, but the keypad is the fallback. It is not the point.

Your money data belongs to you

Transactions live on your device. Turn on sync and they live in your iCloud account, which is also yours.

We run no database of your spending. No account to create, no email to hand over, nothing for us to leak later because we never had it. Export to CSV or Excel is built in, and it always will be.

One honest asterisk, because it matters. Voice clips and receipt photos do leave your phone. They go to an AI model to be read, they come back as transactions, and they are not kept afterwards. If anyone tells you their tracker understands speech without sending the audio anywhere, ask them where it goes.

AI does work, not theatre

The AI here has two jobs. Turn what you said into a transaction with an amount, a merchant, a tag and a date. Read the lines on a receipt or a screenshot into the same.

That is the whole list.

It does not write pep talks. It does not score your week. It never invents a transaction to fill a gap, and when it cannot hear you or cannot read the receipt, it says so and logs nothing. A tracker that guesses is worse than no tracker at all, because you stop being able to argue with it.

Numbers you can trust are numbers that can disappoint

No streaks. No spending score. Nothing that improves because you opened the app more often.

The budget bar goes red when you are over, and it stays red until the month ends or you change the budget yourself. Insights compare this month against last month using your own transactions and nothing else, which sometimes produces a number you would rather not look at. That is the number working.

No feed, no ads, no bank login, ever

Cash Book will never show you other people's spending, a sponsored offer, or a card you ought to apply for. It will never ask for your bank credentials, because it never touches a bank. The only comparison in the app is you against last month.

If we break one of these, tell us. Loudly.