Budgets tell you whether you're keeping to the plan. Insights tells you what the plan should be. It's the page where you explore your money across any date range — filter it, slice it, and literally watch it flow from income to expenses to savings. This guide covers everything on the page: the summary stats, the Flow (Sankey) view, the Cash flow view with its forecast, and the breakdowns by category, merchant, account and tag.
The four numbers at the top
Whatever range and filters you choose, four totals update instantly:
Total in is every euro of income in the range; Total out is every euro spent; Net saved is the difference; and Savings rate is net saved as a share of income — the single most useful number in personal finance. A 16% savings rate means €16 of every €100 you earned stayed with you.
Pick a range, then filter
The range selector (top right) defaults to Last 12 months but takes any period — a month, a quarter, a custom range. Below it, four filters narrow the picture:
- Account — just your joint account, or just the card you're trying to tame.
- Category — one category, e.g. Groceries, to analyse it in isolation.
- Tag — anything you've tagged: a holiday, a renovation, a side project.
- Type — income, expenses, or all.
Filters stack. “Groceries, on the joint account, last 6 months” is three clicks — and every chart and list on the page re-renders to match.
Flow: the Sankey view of where money goes
The Flow view is Talvo's signature chart: a Sankey diagram that draws your income sources on the left — salary, freelance, gifts, refunds — merging into one income stream, then fanning out to the right into every expense category, with one stream flowing to Saved / left over. The width of each band is proportional to the amount, so you don't read the chart — you see it.
The Flow view (a Sankey diagram): every euro that came in on the left, every category it left through on the right — and the green stream that never left at all: your savings.
Things the Flow view makes obvious that a table never will:
- How dominant housing really is. Rent & mortgage at 44.6% of expenses isn't a number anymore; it's nearly half the picture.
- Whether your savings stream is thick or thin — and how it compares to categories you barely think about.
- How dependent you are on one income source. If salary is 93.6% of income, you can see exactly what freelance would need to become to matter.
Cash flow: months as bars, future as a dotted line
Switch to Cash flow and the same data becomes a timeline: green bars for income and red bars for expenses each month (or quarter, or year), a black Net line running through them, and a dashed Forecast extending past today — Talvo's projection of where the current month and the next will land based on your patterns.
August looks alarming — until you notice it's day 5. The dashed forecast line shows where the month is actually heading.
Use Monthly to manage the near term, Quarterly to see seasonality (December happens every year), and Yearly to answer the only question that matters long-term: is the gap between the green and red bars growing?
Breakdowns: category, merchant, account, tag
Below the chart, a ranked breakdown lists exactly where the money went, switchable between Category, Merchant, Account and Tag, for expenses or income, with a search box for finding anything instantly.
The killer move is combining a filter with a breakdown. Filter to Groceries, switch the breakdown to Merchant, and the abstract “€2,045 on groceries” becomes concrete:
Six supermarkets. The convenience-store visits at nearly €200/year are the kind of detail that quietly reshapes a grocery budget.
Three questions Insights answers in under a minute
- 1“Can I actually afford to save more?” — Check your savings rate over 12 months, then look at the Flow view for the widest non-essential stream. That's your answer, with a number on it.
- 2“What did that holiday really cost?” — Tag the trip's transactions, filter by the tag, read Total out. Flights, meals, that museum: one number.
- 3“Why was May so expensive?” — Set the range to May, sort the category breakdown, and the culprit is at the top of the list.
Insights shows you the truth; budgets turn it into a plan. And since every chart is only as good as its categories, make sure yours fit your life: managing categories in Talvo.