Guide
Track what comes in, not just what goes out
Every subscription tracker will tell you that you spend £240 a month. Not one of them will tell you whether that is fine. The number only means something next to what arrives — and almost no tracker records that side at all.
A spending total is half a sentence
£240 a month on subscriptions is comfortable on £4,000 of income and genuinely alarming on £1,400. Same number, opposite conclusions. Yet the category has settled on showing you one side of it, because a single descending list of costs is simpler to build and simpler to sell.
The result is a familiar, useless feeling: you open the app, see a total that looks big, feel vaguely bad, and close it again. Nothing about that moment helps you decide anything.
Why recurring income doesn't need a bank feed
This is the part people assume is hard. It isn't, and the reason is worth stating plainly: recurring income is predictable by definition.
Your salary is the same on the same day each month. A retainer is the same each month it runs. Benefits arrive on a schedule set by someone else. These are not transactions that need discovering — you already know them. Entering them once takes about twenty seconds each, and they stay right until something genuinely changes, at which point you change one number.
That is why Outflow can show you both sides without ever asking for a bank login, an account, or a password. There is no server to send anything to.
The privacy point is not incidental here. What you earn is more sensitive than what you spend. An app that keeps your income on your own device — with no account and nowhere to upload it — is a materially different proposition from one that reads it out of your bank feed.
What people actually track
Anything that lands on a repeating schedule:
- A salary, and a second job if you have one
- Freelance retainers and regular client invoices
- Benefits, tax credits and pensions
- Rent from a lodger or a let property
- Maintenance payments, or a standing transfer from a partner
If it arrives on a predictable date, it can be tracked exactly the way a subscription is — same form, same cycles, same reminders.
How to set it up in Outflow
Get Outflow — free on the App Store
Free for up to 5 items. Pro is a one-time purchase, never a subscription.
Keeping the two sides genuinely separate
One design decision matters more than it sounds. It is tempting to net income against spending and show a single figure. Outflow deliberately doesn't.
£100 less arriving and £100 more going out leave you in the same place, but they are not the same event and they call for different responses — one is a conversation with an employer or a client, the other is a subscription you can cancel this afternoon. A single netted number hides which of the two happened. Two honest figures are more useful than one tidy one.
If you share a household
Income and shared costs are the two halves of the same question, and Outflow handles both. Shareflows lets you share chosen subscriptions with a partner over iCloud and split what each of you pays, so a joint bill counts towards your total by your share only rather than being double-counted across two apps. Your income stays yours — sharing a subscription never shares anything else.
| What you need | How Outflow does it |
|---|---|
| Record recurring income | Inflows — same form as a subscription, any cycle |
| Keep it out of your spending total | Income is never counted as a cost |
| Do it without a bank login | No bank linking exists in the app at all |
| Keep earnings private | On-device only; privacy label: Data Not Collected |
| Handle a shared household | Shareflows — share and split chosen subscriptions |
| Avoid another monthly fee | Pro is a one-time purchase |
Common questions
Is there a subscription tracker that also tracks income?
Outflow does, through Inflows. It records money arriving on a schedule and keeps it separate from spending, so your outgoings stay a true figure.
Can I track income without linking my bank?
Yes — and it is the normal way to do it here, because there is no bank linking in Outflow at all. You enter what arrives once and it repeats.
Is this a budgeting app?
No. A budgeting app wants every transaction, which usually means a bank connection and a habit most people drop within a month. Recurring money in and out is a far smaller job: it repeats, so you set it once.
Does income show in the shareable year review?
It shows that you track what comes in. It never shows how much. That one is nobody else's business.
Track both sides — free on the App Store
See also: sharing and splitting with a partner · finding subscriptions you've forgotten · trackers that don't need a bank login