Fittings on Monday, an emergency call-out Tuesday night, a supply-house run Wednesday morning — the admin only gets done if it takes seconds.
Separate business account · No bank logins · Works offline
Personal and Business live side by side with a one-tap switch, so copper, fittings and a replacement torch never land in the same pile as the weekly shop. Each account keeps its own categories and its own charts, which means the Business chart is a real picture of the trade rather than everything you spent.
Speak the expense rather than typing it with wet or dirty hands, or trigger it through Siri without opening the app. The reason most trade expense tracking fails is not discipline, it is that the tool takes ninety seconds and the job does not wait.
Cash Compass flags a category running above its own recent average — so if materials are well up on your normal pace, you see it during the month rather than when the quarter is already gone. There is a week-on-week summary too, which is usually the honest measure of a trade's overheads.
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.
Cash Compass sets up Personal and Business accounts for you, with a switcher at the top of the dashboard. Log materials, tools, van consumables, trade waste and parking under Business; log the rest under Personal. Each account carries its own transactions and charts, so nothing has to be untangled later. If you also do a few private jobs on the side, keeping them in Business from day one is far less painful than sorting a year's worth of receipts in one sitting.
Yes, identically to card. That is the practical advantage of a tracker with no bank connection: nothing is invisible to it. Apps that import from a linked bank account can only see what passed through that account, so cash at a merchant counter has to be typed in by hand regardless. Cash Compass treats every entry the same way because every entry is one you made.
It tracks vehicle costs — fuel, parts, servicing, insurance — as ordinary expense categories. It does not track mileage: there is no GPS logging or automatic trip detection, so it cannot produce the contemporaneous mileage log the IRS expects. For that, run a dedicated mileage app alongside it. Everything else on a plumber's Schedule C is well covered.
Premium includes CSV export, which is the format every bookkeeper and accountant can open. Export the Business account for the period they need and hand it over. What Cash Compass does not produce is a finished set of accounts, a P&L, or filed forms — it is the clean expense record that feeds into those, not the thing that files them.
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