Income & expenses
Add what comes in and what goes out, once or on a repeating cadence.
4 min read
Income and expenses are the building blocks of your projection. Add what comes in (salary, freelance, rent received) and what goes out (rent, groceries, subscriptions), and Steer draws it all forward in time.
Adding an item
Tap the global "+" or Add in Finance, then choose income or expense. Like everything in Steer, it's mostly taps:
Pick from the catalog
Common items appear as chips — Netflix, Spotify, rent, gym, salary. Tap one and the name (and often a typical amount) is filled in for you.
Set the amount
Enter the figure on a keypad with quick-amount shortcuts. Your currency is preset from your profile.
Choose the cadence
Once, or recurring — weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Most bills are monthly or yearly.
Assign an account
Pick which account it flows through. Your Checking account is selected by default, so you can always just tap on.
Linked recipes
Some things in life come in pairs. Instead of adding each side separately, the add screen offers linked recipes that set up a few related items in one go:
The rent (or other income) you receive, paired with its running costs.
A one-off joining cost, plus the recurring charge that follows.
Your regular monthly pay alongside a once-a-year bonus.
Pick one, set the amounts, choose an account, and Steer creates each part as its own item you can edit later. Loans and investments work the same way — open their pages and start from a template.
Recurring vs one-off
- A recurring item repeats on its cadence and shows up in every future period — your monthly rent, your yearly insurance.
- A one-off item happens once on a date — a holiday, a big purchase — and affects only that point in your projection.
Start dates & back-dating
Every item has a start date. Pick "Today" for something new, or set an earlier date for something that's been running for a while — a salary you've had since the new year, say. When you back-date a recurring item, Steer sums up the months you missed so your balance and net-worth line reflect the real progress, not a fresh start from today.
You can back-date up to one year. That keeps the projection honest without turning a single entry into a long, guessed-at history.
Going back further than a year
Add a one-off entry (dated within the last year) for the total amount accrued before that point, then start the recurring item from that same date. The one-off captures the lump you'd built up; the recurring item carries it forward from there.
End dates
A recurring item can also have an end date — for something that stops, like a 12-month phone contract or a fixed-term loan. Set it either by picking the date or by saying it runs for a number of times (Steer works out the date for you); leave it Ongoing if it just keeps going.
You can set the end when you create an item and change it later — open an item's Edit and adjust the Ends field, or switch it back to Ongoing.
The Breakdown view
The Breakdown tab groups your items by the account they live in. Each account is a collapsible card showing its balance and net monthly flow; open it to see a projected-balance chart and the account's income and expenses, with the same log and edit actions as everywhere else.
Normalised for comparison
Steer normalises everything to compare fairly — a €1,200 yearly bill and a €100 monthly bill are shown side by side as the same monthly cost — so you can see what's really driving your spending.
Prices that change in the future
Real life isn't flat — rent goes up, subscriptions get pricier. Instead of editing an item every time, you can schedule a future-dated price change and Steer bakes it into the projection automatically.
Read about future-dated price changes →
Budgets vs what really happens
The amount you set on an item is your budget. When you want to track what actually happened, you can log real transactions against it and compare.