Overview
Expenses in Canwi represent your regular spending and help model how your cashflow changes over time.
You can organise expenses into buckets, set how often they occur, and control how they grow in the future.
Where to Add or Edit Expenses
You can create and update expenses in two places.
During onboarding
When setting up your scenario:
/onboarding/expenses
After onboarding
You can edit expenses anytime from:
Initial Position → Overview OR
Initial Position → Cashflow
Click Edit Expenses to open the expense editor.
How Expenses Are Organised
Expenses are grouped into buckets to keep things organised.
For example:
Weekly Spending
Transport & Auto
Groceries
Personal & Medical
You can edit:
Bucket names
Expense names
Descriptions
Emojis
These can all be updated anytime.
Setting the Expense Amount
Each expense has two key inputs.
Amount
The dollar value of the expense.
Frequency
You can choose from:
Weekly
Fortnightly
Monthly
Quarterly
Yearly
Canwi will automatically conver these to their annual cashflow impact based on rounded interval conversion (e.g. 52 weeks per year, 26 fortnights). Expenses (except for Yearly Expenses) are pro-rated in the first year of your plan based on your plan start month. This behaviour is intentional because yearly expenses usually represent things like; licence renewals, annual subscriptions. We intend to add support for nominating the month in which an annual subscription should be applied in a future update to Canwi.
Expense Growth (Inflation)
By default, expenses grow each year using the Scenario Inflation Rate.
You’ll see this shown as:
Inflation (X%)
This rate is defined in Scenario Settings and ensures your spending projections remain realistic over time.
Advanced Expense Settings
Click Advanced in the top-right of the expense editor to access additional controls.
Advanced options include:
Tax Deductions
You can mark expenses as tax deductible and specify:
Deduction type (e.g. work-related expense, rental property expense)
Owner
Expense type
Expense types
Cash - a real cash expense that reduces your available funds
Depreciation - a tax deduction that does not represent a cash outflow
Custom Inflation
You can override the default inflation behaviour with a specific inflation rate per expense.
Options include:
Fixed Rate
Set a custom growth rate.
Example:
3% per year
Rate + Offset
Base the growth on another scenario rate.
Example:
Wage Growth + 1%
When might you use this?
Education or health costs that historically rise faster than CPI in Australia (e.g. private school fees or health insurance premiums).
Lifestyle spending linked to income, such as travel or dining, which may grow closer to wage growth than inflation.
Specific known increases, such as modelling an expense expected to rise at a steady rate (e.g. 3–4% per year).
Importing or Exporting Expenses
Use Import & Export Expenses in the expense editor to:
download your expense list
upload expenses in bulk
Debts and Loan Repayments
Debts should not be added as expenses.
Instead, add them in the Debts section of Canwi.
When you add a debt:
Canwi calculates the repayment schedule automatically
repayments are included in your financial projections
There’s no need to manually include loan repayments in your expenses.