Do I have to record everything or only the big items?

It depends on the question you want answered. If you want to know what an animal really costs over a year, you have to record the small recurring items too, because those are the ones systematically underestimated and together they weigh as much as one procedure. If all you want is to be able to evidence health spending, for a claim or a tax return, recording the veterinary items and attaching a receipt to each is enough.

I have three animals: how do I split shared expenses?

Shared expenses, such as one bag of food for everybody, have no automatic way of being apportioned between animals. There are two practical options: record them as a budget movement without attributing them to any animal, accepting that the per animal view will understate, or split them by hand into several entries on the individual profiles. The first is faster and more honest; the second gives a more precise cost per animal but demands consistency.

Can I export expenses for my accountant?

Yes. The budget section offers a spreadsheet compatible export and a printable version that goes through the browser's print dialog. The export includes the movements, the per category summary, the state of the limits and the goals, and it respects the display currency you chose. Attached receipts are not embedded in the exported file: they stay attached to their entries and have to be downloaded separately.

What happens to expenses if I delete an animal?

Expenses recorded on that animal's profile belong to the animal, so they follow it. Movements recorded in the budget section remain, because they carry no reference to an animal. Before deleting a profile it is therefore worth exporting, both with the per animal export and with the budget one, so that whatever you need later stays available outside the app.

Category names are in Italian in the stored data even in the English interface: why?

What you see on screen is translated into the language you chose. In storage, however, the value kept is a fixed identifier shared with the iPhone app, which decodes it as a closed list. If that identifier changed with the language, documents written from the web would no longer be readable on the phone. That is why the list is closed and why custom categories live in the subcategory field rather than in the category itself.

Using Animiyo25 minLevel: BeginnerUpdated on August 5, 2026

Recording expenses and seeing where the money goes

The two expense registers, the available categories, how to set limits and goals, and the trap hidden in linking a movement to an animal.

Audience: Pet owners
Species: All species
Scope: Valid everywhere, Italy

What you need before you start

Almeno un animale già registrato, altrimenti la vista per animale resta vuota
Gli scontrini o le fatture degli ultimi tre mesi, anche solo fotografati
Una decisione presa in anticipo su quali spese consideri dell'animale e quali no
Se convivi con altre persone, un accordo su chi registra che cosa

Almost everybody starts recording pet expenses after an invoice they were not expecting, and almost everybody stops three weeks later because they cannot see the point. The problem is not discipline, it is structure: if you do not decide in advance where each kind of expense goes and under which category, after two months you have a list that answers no useful question. In Animiyo expenses live in two separate registers, one inside the animal's profile and one in the budget section, with two different category lists and different behaviour. This guide explains which to use when, how to set limits and goals that actually produce alerts, how to read the summaries, and which trap to avoid when you link a movement to an animal.

Two registers that look alike

The first thing to understand is that a pet expense and a budget movement are two different documents, saved in different places and read by different screens. It is not a duplication waiting to be fixed, it is a structural choice, but you need to know about it because it decides where you will find the numbers again.

The two expense registers, with what each one can and cannot do.
Register	Where it lives	What sets it apart
Pet expenses	The expenses tab inside a single animal	Every entry belongs to one animal and is the only source for the per animal view
Budget movements	The budget section, movements tab	Entries for the whole account, with payment method, recurrence, currency and receipt

A pet expense has four essential fields: date, category, amount and description, plus an optional place.
A budget movement has many more, including payment method, subcategory, recurrence, notes and the sign that separates an expense from income.
The view showing how much each animal cost reads only pet expenses, because budget movements carry no reference to an animal.
Category limits, goals, the annual forecast and the tax section all work on budget movements only.
If all you want is to know what your dog costs, the first register is enough. If you also want limits, alerts and a forecast, you need the second one too.

Recording an expense step by step

Decide who the expense belongs to
One animal, several animals, or the household. That choice determines which register the entry goes in, and it should be made before you open any form.
Record the real date on the receipt
Not the date you are typing. The difference looks small and it destroys any comparison between months, as well as making the annual forecast useless.
Pick the category from the closed list
The lists are fixed because they are shared with the iPhone app. If no category convinces you, use Other and put the detail in the description, which is free text.
Write a description you will recognise in a year
Not the name of the shop but the thing you bought. Post operative check up is useful; clinic in town tells you nothing when you reread it in December.
If you are recording a budget movement, add the payment method
In some countries deductibility of veterinary expenses depends on the payment being traceable, so the field is not decorative.
Set recurrence only when the expense genuinely repeats
The options are none, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The forecast uses it to separate ordinary from extraordinary spending, so declaring it at random makes the estimate worse.
Attach the receipt when the amount is large
The receipts tab accepts PDF files and images up to ten megabytes each, and shows how many expenses already have an attachment. For small amounts it is not worth the time.
Save and check it appears in the right month
The check takes two seconds and catches the single most common mistake, which is leaving the date on today.

The categories available in each register

The lists are closed and they do not match. The one on the animal's profile is short and built around an animal's life; the budget one is longer and comes from a general spending model, which is why it contains entries that look out of place at first glance.

The eight categories in the pet expenses tab and the fourteen in budget movements.
Register	Available categories
Pet expenses	Food, Vet, Toys, Grooming, Boarding, Insurance, Training, Other
Budget movements	Transport, Accommodation, Food and drink, Activities and tours, Shopping, Health and medicines, Communication, Entertainment, Souvenirs, Emergencies, Insurance, Visas and documents, Tips and gifts, Other

Custom categories do exist, but they work in a way worth knowing: they do not add an entry to the closed list, because that list is shared with the iPhone app and inventing a value inside it would break synchronisation. A custom category lives in the subcategory field and declares which base category it falls under. The result is that the iPhone sees the base category and the web sees the detail as well.

Limits, goals and alerts

Recording without thresholds produces an archive, not control. The budget configuration sets a total amount, a currency, a date range and per category limits; the alerts shown in the dedicated tab all come from there.

The daily limit can be calculated automatically from the total amount and the date range, or set by hand.
Category limits are set one by one and produce the most useful alerts, because they catch an imbalance before the overall total is breached.
Warning thresholds are configurable: by default the daily limit warning fires at eighty percent and the category one at ninety percent.
Goals come in six declared types: saving, spending limit, category limit, daily limit, emergency fund and reward.
Every goal carries a priority among low, medium, high and critical, a deadline, and a reminder frequency among daily, weekly, monthly and never.
Progress on a goal is updated by hand, by adding, subtracting or setting the amount reached directly.

Seeing where the money goes

Once a few months of data exist, the reading tabs become more interesting than the entry ones. They are different views of the same movements and they answer different questions.

The reading views and the question each one answers.
View	Question it answers
Summary	How much I have spent so far, what is left, and which categories it concentrates in
Alerts	Which limits I am about to breach or have already breached
Forecast	What I will spend over the year given the history, separating ordinary from extraordinary
Emergency fund	How much I should set aside given my animals' risk profile
Per animal	What each animal has cost, read only from the expenses recorded on its own profile
Split	Who owes what to whom, when expenses are shared between several people
Quotes	How different quotes for the same procedure compare

The forecast states a confidence interval and warns when the data is too thin, typically under three months of history. It is a statistical estimate built on your own movements, not a comparison with other users or with market prices: no function in the section compares your amounts with anybody else's.

If you deal with several currencies, the converter restates every amount in your chosen currency using exchange rates fetched at the time, and the export respects the display currency. Movements still keep the original currency, the original amount and the rate applied, so the starting figure is never lost.

The linking trap and the other limits

The budget movement form has a field that lets you attach the expense to an animal. What actually happens is a copy rather than a link: the movement is saved in the budget and, in addition, a separate expense is created on the animal's profile, with the category translated into the shorter list. From that moment the two entries live independently.

If you later change the amount of the budget movement, the pet expense keeps the old value.
If you delete the budget movement, the pet expense is not deleted.
The category translation is approximate: health and medicines becomes vet, food and drink becomes food, insurance becomes insurance, shopping becomes toys, and everything else becomes other.
The link only applies when the movement is an expense: on income the field is ignored.
Adding the two registers together to get a total is therefore wrong, because it counts every linked expense twice.

There are also things many people expect that do not exist. There is no import of movements from a bank account or card. There is no automatic reading of the amount from a photograph of a receipt: a receipt is attached, not read. There are no notifications reaching your phone when you breach a limit. There is no automatic reset of the budget at the start of a month: the date range is yours to set and yours to update.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to record everything or only the big items?: It depends on the question you want answered. If you want to know what an animal really costs over a year, you have to record the small recurring items too, because those are the ones systematically underestimated and together they weigh as much as one procedure. If all you want is to be able to evidence health spending, for a claim or a tax return, recording the veterinary items and attaching a receipt to each is enough.
I have three animals: how do I split shared expenses?: Shared expenses, such as one bag of food for everybody, have no automatic way of being apportioned between animals. There are two practical options: record them as a budget movement without attributing them to any animal, accepting that the per animal view will understate, or split them by hand into several entries on the individual profiles. The first is faster and more honest; the second gives a more precise cost per animal but demands consistency.
Can I export expenses for my accountant?: Yes. The budget section offers a spreadsheet compatible export and a printable version that goes through the browser's print dialog. The export includes the movements, the per category summary, the state of the limits and the goals, and it respects the display currency you chose. Attached receipts are not embedded in the exported file: they stay attached to their entries and have to be downloaded separately.
What happens to expenses if I delete an animal?: Expenses recorded on that animal's profile belong to the animal, so they follow it. Movements recorded in the budget section remain, because they carry no reference to an animal. Before deleting a profile it is therefore worth exporting, both with the per animal export and with the budget one, so that whatever you need later stays available outside the app.
Category names are in Italian in the stored data even in the English interface: why?: What you see on screen is translated into the language you chose. In storage, however, the value kept is a fixed identifier shared with the iPhone app, which decodes it as a closed list. If that identifier changed with the language, documents written from the web would no longer be readable on the phone. That is why the list is closed and why custom categories live in the subcategory field rather than in the category itself.

What to do next

Decide the rule before you begin: an expense attributable to one animal goes on its profile, a household expense goes in budget movements. Record at the moment of payment with the real date, use the closed category list and put the detail in the description. Set at least two category limits so the alerts have something to compare against, and remember that linking a movement to an animal creates a copy rather than a link: changing one does not update the other, and adding the two registers together counts twice.