Freelance money is easy to lose track of: a tool billed here, a one-off expense there, income arriving on no fixed schedule. This walkthrough pulls those pieces into one monthly view — what came in, what went out, and what's committed to go out again next month — so you can answer "how did this month go?" with a number instead of a guess.
The setup is front-loaded: once your recurring costs and a habit of logging expenses are in place, the monthly summary is something you read, not something you assemble.
The goal
A monthly picture of money in and money out — including the recurring costs that are easy to forget — that you can pull up in a moment and export when the accountant asks.
1. Record what goes in and out
Everything starts with transactions: each one is a single piece of money moving, income or expense. The more accurately you record these, the truer every summary downstream.
- Log expenses as they happen. Add them on the new transaction form — amount, date, currency, category. A caught expense is a deductible expense; a forgotten one is just money gone.
- Split out the tax if you reclaim it. Tick Split into net and tax on the form to enter the amount before tax and let Ceum calculate the total. Later you can flip your insights and reports between gross, net, and tax-only totals, which is what turns a month of expenses into a VAT figure without a spreadsheet. See Recording tax.
- Skip the typing with receipt scanning. Scan a receipt and let Ceum read the amount, date, and currency off it, so logging an expense is a photo rather than a form. The scanned image is attached to the transaction and saved with it, so the receipt lives with the expense — and you can update or remove that attachment later.
- Record income too. Invoices you've been paid, and any income that didn't come through an invoice, belong here — they're the "in" half of the picture.
If you work across currencies, Exchange rates and Currency formatting explain how amounts are converted and shown so a mixed-currency month still totals up sensibly.
2. Put the recurring costs on autopilot
The expenses that distort a monthly picture are the ones you forget because you never actively pay them — the monthly tools, the annual renewals. Subscriptions exist so you only enter those once.
Add each recurring cost on the new subscription form with its amount and cadence. From then on, each renewal posts itself as a transaction automatically, so your monthly totals already include the committed spend without you lifting a finger. Set up your income subscriptions the same way if you have retainers or recurring payments coming in.
To look ahead at what's coming, the subscriptions view surfaces what's due next — useful for spotting an annual renewal before it's due rather than after.
3. Read the month as a breakdown
With income, expenses, and auto-posted renewals all flowing into transactions, open Transactions insights and set the range to the month you care about.
This is the summary view: totals for money in and money out, broken down by category, over your chosen window. Group by category to see where the month's spend concentrated; compare it against income to see what the month actually netted. For the recurring side specifically, Subscriptions insights shows what your committed spend looks like on its own. Export any of it (CSV, XLS, or PDF) from the insights page when you need a copy.
4. Line months up against each other
One month in isolation is a data point; the trend is the story. Transactions reports builds a pivot — categories down the side, months across the top, amounts in the cells — so you can watch a category creep up over a quarter or see which months are lean.
Open Transactions reports, choose your rows and columns, and the shape of your year comes into focus: seasonal income, a subscription bill that's quietly grown, the month a big expense went out. This is the view that turns "how did this month go?" into "how is the year going?".
What you end up with
A monthly summary that already includes the costs you'd otherwise forget, split by category, comparable month to month, and exportable when you need it. The busywork — logging, remembering renewals — is automated or reduced to a photo, so the picture stays current without much upkeep.