Off Finance vs Notion for tracking expenses
My girlfriend and I tracked our spending in Notion. A table, plus pages and sub-pages for each month, all kept aligned by hand. Adding one expense on the phone took minutes, because tables are hard to use on a small screen. Seeing what we spent in a month or a year took manual work every time, and it didn’t work well without internet. So I built Off Finance.
Notion is great for notes and projects. This page is about one job: keeping track of everyday spending, alone or with a partner.
| What you need | Off Finance | Notion |
|---|---|---|
| Adding an expense on your phone | Type the amount, pick a category, save. Or use free Expense automation on Android: Google Wallet purchases with category and payment-method rules add themselves; anything else waits for review. | Open the database and fill in a row, one column at a time, in a table made for a bigger screen. |
| Monthly and yearly totals | The month opens with income, spending, and what’s left. Performance shows how the months and the year add up. | Possible with column sums, formulas, and filtered views that you build and keep up to date yourself. |
| Recurring bills | Set the amount and the day once. Each month gets its entry, and you can pause or stop it. | Repeating templates, or copying rows by hand. |
| Installments | Enter the total and the number of payments. Each one shows up in its own month. | One row per payment, or formulas you set up. |
| Budgets | Monthly budgets by category and payment method, with what’s left to spend. | Formulas and properties you build yourself. |
| Sharing with a partner | A shared vault by invitation. You see who added what, and only the vault’s owner pays for sync. | Share the page or the workspace. Both of you need to learn how it was set up. |
| Without internet | Everything on your phone works offline. Sync catches up when you’re back online. | Works in the desktop and phone apps for pages you mark as available offline ahead of time. Large databases are only partly downloaded. |
| Learning to use it | No tutorial. Open the app, add the expense, done. | You design the system, and anyone who shares it has to learn how it works. |
| Price | Free on your phone. Sync is $3.00 a month, and only a shared vault’s owner pays. | Has a free plan. Paid plans add more features. |
Notion details checked on October 4, 2026.
Why choose Off Finance
- Add an expense in seconds, right on your phone.
- Monthly totals without formulas.
- Works without internet.
- Share a vault with your partner by invitation.