Monthly Reports and PDF Exports
Monthly Reports and PDF Exports 📊
Section titled “Monthly Reports and PDF Exports 📊”While the Ledger is great for finding individual receipts, the Reports tab is where you go to analyse your long-term spending habits.
Are you spending more on fuel this month than you did in the summer? Is your grocery budget creeping up over time? The Reports engine aggregates all your data into beautiful, easy-to-read summaries.
To access your reports, navigate to the Accounts tab and tap the Reports button in the control bar.
📈 The Master Dashboard & Trends
Section titled “📈 The Master Dashboard & Trends”When you open the Reports tab, you are viewing data for a specific year (you can change the year using the picker in the top right corner).
The dashboard is split into three main sections:
1. Sparkline Trends
Section titled “1. Sparkline Trends”At the very top of the screen is the Trend List. This looks at your spending across your major Category Groups (like “Transport,” “Food,” or “Living”) and draws a mini sparkline chart for each one. This allows you to instantly see if your spending in a specific area is trending upwards or downwards over the course of the year!
2. All-Time Spending Treemap
Section titled “2. All-Time Spending Treemap”Below the trends, you will see a colourful Treemap. This provides a massive, all-time breakdown of exactly where your money goes. The larger the coloured block, the more money you have historically spent in that category.
3. Monthly Summaries
Section titled “3. Monthly Summaries”Scroll down to see a list of every month you have been travelling. Each row gives you a quick snapshot of your total Income, total Expenses, and your Net Result (whether you saved money or lost money that month).
🔍 Deep Dive: The Monthly Detail View
Section titled “🔍 Deep Dive: The Monthly Detail View”To see exactly what happened in a specific month, tap on its row.
The Monthly Detail View breaks down your 30 days of vanlife into granular detail:
- The Monthly Treemap: A visual representation of your spending just for that specific month.
- Category Breakdown: A highly organised list showing exactly how much you spent. To keep it readable, expenses are bundled by your custom Category Groups (e.g., seeing all your “Diesel”, “Tolls”, and “Parking” totals neatly organised under the “Transport” header).
- Largest Expenses: At the bottom, the app highlights your top 5 most expensive purchases of the month, making it easy to spot where your budget went.
🖨️ PDF Exports
Section titled “🖨️ PDF Exports”Whether you want to print a physical copy for your records, or email a summary to your partner or accountant, Vanlife Assistant has a built-in PDF generator.
How to export a month:
- Open a specific month from the Reports tab.
- In the top right corner, tap the PDF Share icon.
- The app will instantly generate a beautifully formatted A4 document containing your summary, a pie chart of your top categories, and your detailed breakdown.
- You can then AirDrop it, print it directly to a wireless printer, or save it to your iPhone’s Files app!
Need raw data instead?
Section titled “Need raw data instead?”If you are a spreadsheet nerd and want to build your own pivot tables in Excel or Numbers, you don’t want a PDF! 👉 Check out CSV Export Service to learn how to download your raw Ledger data.