Between the supply house, the parts counter and four calls before lunch, business spending gets logged from a truck cab or not at all.
Separate business account · No bank logins · Works offline
Cash Compass ships with separate Personal and Business accounts and a switcher at the top of the dashboard. A capacitor bought on the way to a call goes in Business; lunch goes in Personal. At tax time you are not picking one out of the other — they were never mixed.
You are carrying gauges, a recovery machine and a phone. Say the expense instead of typing it: amount, what it was, done. Siri and Shortcuts work too, so it can be logged from the truck without unlocking into the app first.
Photograph the receipt while it is still in your hand and it is filed. Thermal paper from a parts counter fades and gets lost in a door pocket — the photo does not. Come year end, the CSV export goes straight to whoever does your return.
Voice, photo of a receipt, or 3-tap manual entry — every method takes seconds.
Pick Business or Personal, and the category. Cash Compass remembers your pattern.
Charts show where the money went, and flag a category running above its usual pace.
It is an expense tracker, not accounting software. There is no invoicing, no estimates, no payroll, no job costing, and no GPS mileage log — mileage is usually a trade's biggest deduction, so run a dedicated mileage app alongside it. What this replaces is the shoebox of faded receipts and the end-of-year guessing.
Use the built-in account switcher. Cash Compass creates a Personal and a Business account by default and you flip between them at the top of the dashboard — each keeps its own transactions, categories and charts. Log refrigerant, fittings, filters and consumables under Business, and everything else under Personal. Because the split happens at entry time rather than in a cleanup pass later, you are not trying to reconstruct which Home Depot run was a job and which was your own bathroom.
No — and it is worth being straight about that, because mileage is usually an HVAC tech's single largest deduction. Cash Compass has no GPS or automatic drive detection. If you want the IRS-required contemporaneous mileage log, pair it with a dedicated mileage app and keep that separate. What Cash Compass does well is everything that is not mileage: parts, tools, consumables, permits, fuel receipts, phone, and the rest of the Schedule C picture.
Not as a full replacement. Cash Compass does not do invoicing, estimates, payroll, or job costing — it is an expense tracker, not accounting software. Where it fits is the part QuickBooks is genuinely bad at: capturing a spend in five seconds while you are standing at a counter. Many one-van operations use Cash Compass for capture through the year, then hand the CSV export to a bookkeeper. If you need to invoice customers, you still need something else alongside it.
They work exactly like card spending, which is the whole point of a manual tracker. Apps built on bank connections only see what moved through a linked account, so cash is invisible to them until you patch it in by hand anyway. Cash Compass has no bank connection at all — every entry is something you logged, so a cash payment at a counter and a card payment at the same counter are recorded identically.
Two accounts with a one-tap switch, each with its own categories and charts.
No bank logins, no Plaid, no data sales. Your data stays in your iCloud.
Unlimited manual entry, both accounts, and charts — free, with no ads.
Free to start, with unlimited manual entry. Premium is $29.99/year and unlocks unlimited voice, receipt capture, iCloud sync, and the CSV export your accountant will ask for.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store