Freelance finances leak away in small pieces: a tool here, a one-off expense there, income landing on no particular schedule. This walkthrough gathers those pieces into one monthly view — what came in, what went out, and what's committed to go out again next month — so "how did this month go?" stops being a shrug.
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 faithfully these land, 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.
- 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.
- 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 about to hit, the subscriptions view surfaces what's coming due — useful for spotting an annual renewal before it lands 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 landed. 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.
The income side of this picture comes from getting paid: From tracked work to a paid invoice is how the work becomes revenue. To understand the effort behind that revenue, See where your time actually goes reads your hours the same way this guide reads your money.