Take control of your spending, one transaction at a time.
Dribs is a manual budget tracker for iPhone and iPad. You record each expense yourself, or import a CSV from your bank, and set monthly spending limits for the categories that matter. Nothing syncs with your bank, so every transaction passes in front of you as it goes in.
The honest trade-off.
Typing in your own transactions isn't for everyone. Here's what you gain and what it costs.
Why it works
- You notice every purchase, which is often enough on its own to change habits.
- Each transaction gets the right category from the start, instead of fixing a bank's guesses later.
- There's no bank connection to re-authorize, and no feed that breaks when your bank changes its systems.
- It works with any bank in any country, and with cash, in 82 currencies.
What it costs you
- A few seconds for each transaction you enter.
- Balances are only as accurate as your entries, so a missed coffee shows up as a small difference.
- If you skip a week, you'll need to catch up. A CSV import from your bank makes that quicker.
- There's no automatic categorization from bank data.
Recording a transaction takes seconds.
Add it while you remember
Tap +, type the amount and choose expense, income or transfer. The keypad works as a calculator, so 9.50 + 6.20 becomes one €15.70 expense.
Categorize your way
Build your own categories and subcategories with icons and colors. Tags cover things that cut across categories, like a trip or a project.
Let regular payments add themselves
Set rent, salary or subscriptions to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, with an optional end date. Dribs creates each one on schedule, with no reminders to dismiss.
Importing transactions from your bank.
Most online banking lets you download your transactions as a CSV file. Dribs turns that file into transactions in one of your accounts, and you check everything before it's saved.
Download a CSV from your bank
In your online banking, export the transactions for the period you need as a CSV file, and save it to Files on your iPhone or iPad.
Open Settings → Import CSV
Choose the file, then pick the Dribs account the transactions belong to, for example your checking account or your credit card.
Check the column mapping
Dribs recognizes common column names in English, German and Spanish, such as Date, Description, Amount, Buchungsdatum, Verwendungszweck or Betrag. It also reads category, subcategory and tag columns if the file has them. Under Adjust column mapping you can change any column, switch between a single amount column and separate debit and credit columns, and set the date format, the decimal separator and whether negative amounts are expenses.
Review, then import
You see every transaction before it's saved. Rows Dribs can't read, for example without a date or amount, are listed with the reason. You can skip or edit any row and choose default expense and income categories for rows without one. Categories named in the file that don't exist yet are created for you.
Tip: import each date range once. If your file overlaps with transactions you've already entered, skip those rows in the review step.
Budgets, kept simple.
Budgets in Dribs are monthly spending limits. A budget can cover one or more categories, accounts or tags, and you set the limit month by month. Old budgets can be archived. Budgets are part of the free version.
Dribs doesn't do envelope or zero-based budgeting, rollovers or budget alerts. If you want a method that assigns every dollar a purpose before you spend it, a dedicated budgeting app like YNAB is built for that; our Dribs vs. YNAB comparison explains the difference.
Three ways to use it.
A grocery budget
Create a monthly budget of €400 for Groceries and log each shop as you leave the store. The Budgets tab shows how much of it you've spent so far this month.
Keeping subscriptions in check
Add each subscription as a monthly recurring transaction under a Subscriptions category, with subcategories like Video or Apps. Open the category to see the monthly total and which ones make up most of it.
Catching up after a holiday
Instead of typing in two weeks of card payments, export them from your bank as a CSV, import them into the card's account, and adjust any categories that need it.
Frequently asked questions
What is a manual budget tracker?
An app where you record transactions yourself instead of importing them automatically from your bank. You decide what goes in and how it's categorized, and your banking login never leaves your hands.
Does Dribs categorize transactions automatically?
No. You pick a category when you add a transaction. When you import a CSV, Dribs uses the file's category column if it has one, and otherwise the default categories you choose for that import.
Can I log expenses with Siri or Shortcuts?
Yes. Dribs includes Shortcuts actions to log an expense (optionally to a specific account), log income, check a balance and see this month's spending, and you can run them with Siri.
Can I bring my data from another budgeting app?
There are no app-specific importers. If the other app exports a CSV with date, description and amount columns, you can import it account by account, and category, subcategory and tag columns are read too.
Keep reading
Start with one transaction.
Download Dribs for free, add today's coffee, and see how a week of tracking changes the way you spend.
