A khata app tracks money lent and borrowed between people, not money spent. When you lend a friend 5,000, that is not an expense. The money is still yours, it is just somewhere else. A khata records it as a debt with a running balance per person, and clears it when they pay you back.
Finly is a free khata app that does this alongside ordinary expense tracking. It runs in the browser, works offline, and needs no bank connection. Each person gets their own ledger and a single number: what they owe you, or what you owe them.
Four ways people track it, and what goes wrong
Almost everyone starts with one of these. They fail in predictable ways, and the failure is usually social rather than mathematical.
1. Memory
Works for a week and one person. It fails because two people remember the same loan differently and neither is lying — the person who lent it remembers the full amount, the person who borrowed remembers the partial repayment. There is no record to settle it, so the friendship absorbs the difference.
2. The group chat
Better, because there is a timestamp. Worse, because the record is scattered across months of unrelated messages and nobody can produce a balance without scrolling. Useful as evidence, useless as an account.
3. A spreadsheet
Genuinely good if you keep it up. A row per transaction, a running balance per person, and it will outlive any app. The failure is friction: nobody opens a spreadsheet standing outside a shop, so entries get deferred and then forgotten.
4. A dedicated ledger
What a khata has always been: one page per person, amounts in and out, a balance at the bottom. The digital version keeps that shape and removes the arithmetic. The thing to check before picking one is whether it keeps lending separate from spending — most expense trackers do not, and that is the distinction that matters most.
Three rules that prevent most disputes
- Record it when it happens, not later. The entry you postpone is the entry that never gets made, and it is always the one that gets disputed.
- Only a real payment reduces the balance. A promise to pay on Friday is not a payment. Recording intentions as transactions is how ledgers drift away from reality.
- Both people should be able to see the same number. Even if the record lives on one phone, read the balance out when it changes. A ledger nobody else can check is a diary.
Why an expense tracker cannot do this
Every mainstream expense tracker has one shape for a transaction: money left, categorise it, move on. That is wrong for lending in two ways at once.
If you log the 5,000 you lent as an expense, your month looks 5,000 worse than it was, your category budgets are distorted, and when the money comes back you either log it as income, which is also wrong, or you delete the original and lose the record that the loan happened at all.
If you do not log it, you are relying on memory. That is fine for one loan. It is not fine for the fourteen small ones that build up over a year between family, colleagues and the shop on the corner.
The reason the big apps have no answer is not oversight. Mint, YNAB and Monarch were designed around a bank account being the source of truth, in places where informal lending between people is not a normal part of managing money. Where it is normal, the category is simply missing.
How the khata in Finly works
- Two directions. Record money you lent, or money you borrowed. Both live in the same ledger.
- A balance per person. Entries group by name. Ahmed's page shows every transaction with Ahmed and one net figure at the top.
- Partial repayment. Someone paying back 2,000 of 5,000 leaves a balance of 3,000, not a deleted record.
- Settled state. When a balance reaches zero it is marked settled and drops out of your active list, but the history stays.
- Separate from expenses. Nothing in the khata touches your monthly spending total, your category breakdown or your budgets. That is the point.
- Notes and dates. Every entry carries a date and a description, so "what was that 3,000 in March" has an answer.
Khata entry or expense: which is which
| Situation | Record it as |
|---|---|
| Lent a friend 5,000 | Khata, lent |
| Friend paid back 5,000 | Khata, settles the balance |
| Borrowed 2,000 from a cousin | Khata, borrowed |
| Paid for a friend's lunch, they will repay | Khata, lent |
| Paid for a friend's lunch as a gift | Expense |
| Bought groceries | Expense |
| Shopkeeper credit you will clear at month end | Khata, borrowed |
The test is simple. If you expect the money to come back, or expect to pay it out later, it is khata. If it is gone, it is an expense.
What else is in the app
The khata is one part of Finly, not the whole of it. The same app tracks ordinary spending, and you can add an expense by speaking it rather than filling a form. There are per-category budgets, a monthly breakdown, a searchable history with CSV export, and portfolio tracking for PSX stocks, crypto, funds and gold.
It is local-first, so everything is written to your device before it touches the network and the app keeps working with no signal. And it never asks for a bank login.
What it does not do
Worth knowing before you start, because the alternative is finding out later:
It does not chase anyone for you. There are no reminder messages to the other person, no SMS, no WhatsApp integration. Finly is your record, not a collections tool.
The other person has no account. A khata entry is a name you typed. They cannot see it, confirm it or dispute it. If a loan is large enough that you need agreement on the record, this is not the right tool for it.
It does not calculate interest. Balances are simple sums of what went out and what came back.
Common questions
Is Finly's khata free?
Yes. The whole app is free, with no paid tier, no trial and no ads. You need a free account to add or edit records, because that is what syncs them between your devices.
Do I need to connect a bank account?
No, and you cannot. Finly has no bank integration at all. Every record exists because you entered it, which is also why it works for cash lending, where a bank feed would show nothing.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Entries are written to your device first, so you can record a loan with no signal. If you are signed in, it syncs when you are back online.
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. It runs in the phone browser and installs to the home screen as an app. It is not on the App Store or Play Store, so there is nothing to download.
What happens when someone pays me back in instalments?
Record each repayment as it happens. The person's balance reduces each time and the full history stays visible, so you can see that 5,000 came back as 2,000 in March and 3,000 in May.
Can I track khata in a different currency from my expenses?
Finly supports 11 currencies including PKR, INR, AED, SAR, USD, GBP and EUR. Entries carry the currency they were recorded in.
Is my khata data private?
It is stored on your device and, if you sign in, on a server run directly by Finly's developer rather than a third-party cloud. Finly runs Google Analytics for aggregate page views, but it never sees the names or amounts you enter, only that the khata screen was opened. One thing worth being aware of: a khata entry contains another person's name, and they never agreed to anything. Finly never contacts them or uses those names for anything. The privacy policy says so in plain terms.