How do people track expenses before using a finance app?

The Main Data Point

Most people do not arrive at a finance app after trying five different methods.

They arrive with no method at all.

Among people who start using Gasti, 62% were not tracking their expenses or were relying on memory before getting started. Only a minority came from a previous tool such as Excel, paper, or another app.

That data changes how we look at the problem.

The real competitor of a personal finance app is not always another app. Many times, it is not even a spreadsheet. The real competitor is nothing: not tracking, not reviewing, not having one place to see the full month.

What The Onboarding Data Shows

Among the people who answered Gasti’s onboarding survey:

• 6 out of 10 were not tracking anything or were relying on memory: 62%.
• 4 out of 10 do not know where their money goes: 41.4%.
• 6 out of 10 come to get organized: 61.3%.
• Half come to understand what they spend on: 50.8%.

There is an important clarification: these numbers do not describe the average Argentine person.

They describe people who decided to start using Gasti and answered questions during onboarding. In other words, people who already had some motivation to organize their finances, understand their expenses, or try a simpler way to record transactions.

Even so, the pattern is strong: even among people who want to get organized, most were not using a system.

What It Means For The Real Rival To Be Nothing

When people talk about personal finance apps, competition is often framed as one tool against another: an app against another app, an app against Excel, an app against a notebook.

But the data shows something else.

The largest market does not seem to be people who tried Excel and gave up. It is people who never started, or who tried to rely on memory until memory was no longer enough.

And that makes sense.

Tracking expenses usually requires too much work: opening an app, choosing a category, typing an amount, selecting a date, checking whether the expense was saved correctly, and repeating that every time.

For one purchase, it may seem small. For every transaction in a month, it becomes heavy.

The problem is not lack of willpower. It is friction.

Why Memory Is Not Enough

Memory is useful for many things, but not for managing a full financial month.

Memory rounds numbers. It forgets small expenses. It mixes categories. It minimizes repeated purchases. It does not add up what happened across different places: cash, cards, transfers, digital wallets, accounts in another currency.

That is why a very common feeling appears: reaching the end of the month without understanding where the money went.

There is not always one huge expense that explains everything. Many times, it is medium and small expenses, repeated over weeks, that were never written down anywhere.

When there is no record, the month is reconstructed through intuition. And intuition usually arrives late.

The Problem Is Not Only Knowing How Much You Spent

Knowing how much you spent helps, but it is not enough.

What matters is being able to see patterns:

• which categories grew;
• which expenses repeat every month;
• which purchases seemed small but add up significantly;
• how much of the month went to going out, delivery, transport, or subscriptions;
• which transactions were not on your radar.

That is where tracking starts to matter.

It is not about writing things down just for the sake of it. It is about creating a clearer picture of the month so you can decide earlier, not later.

Why Many Tools Fail Before People Even Start

Many personal finance solutions assume people are willing to enter data consistently.

But that is exactly the hard part.

If recording an expense requires too many steps, the habit breaks. If the system depends on sitting down once a week to organize everything, it is easy to postpone. If every transaction requires thinking about category, amount, date, and description, the tool starts to feel like another task.

And when a financial organization tool feels like administrative work, many people go back to the starting point: nothing.

Not because they do not care about their money. Because the cost of sustaining the system is too high.

What To Do If You Do Not Track Anything Today

If you do not track expenses today, the worst thing you can do is try to perfectly reconstruct the past.

That usually creates guilt, fatigue, and abandonment.

The most useful thing is to start from today.

You do not need the full month for tracking to start being useful. With just a few days of transactions, you can already see signals: repeated expenses, categories that show up more than expected, small purchases that add up, and places where more money goes than you thought.

Consistency does not come from demanding more discipline from yourself. It comes from lowering friction.

The easier it is to record, the more likely the habit is to exist.

Why Gasti Uses WhatsApp

Gasti works through WhatsApp because it is where most people already are.

You do not need to open a spreadsheet. You do not need to remember to enter everything at the end of the day. You do not need to start with a perfect setup.

You can write an expense or send it by audio, and Gasti records and categorizes it.

The idea is simple: if the main rival is not tracking anything, the first step has to be almost effortless.

Then, once expenses are recorded, the dashboard can show a clearer reading: how much you spent, in which categories, what repeats, how the month is going, and where it is worth paying attention.

Methodology

The data comes from Gasti’s onboarding survey.

The sample includes more than 10,000 onboarding starts and around 1,500 people who answered questions about financial habits and goals. Depending on the question, the sample size ranges from n=1,493 to n=1,496.

The data is aggregated and anonymous.

It is also important to repeat the framing: these results describe people who started using Gasti, not the entire Argentine population.

What This Data Tells Us

The data does not say people do not want to organize their finances.

It says something more interesting: many people do want to get organized, but they did not have a system easy enough to maintain.

That is why the challenge is not only showing better charts or more metrics. The challenge is making the first record happen, making the second one easy, and making the habit not depend on sitting down to do personal administration every day.

In personal finance, the tool that wins is not necessarily the most complete one.

Many times, it is the one that gets you started.

Closing

Before using a finance app, many people are not comparing tools.

They are trying to get by with memory, intuition, and a few loose calculations.

The problem is that memory does not add up, does not categorize, and does not warn you in time.

Gasti exists to beat that nothing: expenses recorded with a message and your month visible in seconds.

Because understanding your money should not start with a perfect spreadsheet. It should start with something much simpler: recording the next expense.