Exploring your data

The Explore page in Commander Finance builds charts from your transactions, accounts, and budget lines. Use it to answer questions like “how did my income compare to expenses last year?” or “which budget lines drove my spending this month?”

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Page layout

Open Explore from the sidebar. The content area runs top to bottom: a horizontal preset rail of starting points, the chart, and an Underlying data table beneath it—the table always shows the exact numbers behind the chart, including a Total column when more than one series is present. A Copy button at the top of the table copies the current rows to your clipboard as TSV, ready to paste into a spreadsheet. The inspector pane on the right holds every control that shapes the chart, split into four always-visible groups: Chart setup (how the chart groups your data and which visualization it uses), Series (what the chart plots), Filters (what data feeds it), and Display (the visible range and chart decorations). Edits to any control update the chart and the data table together. Copy link and Export CSV live at the top of the inspector: Copy link puts a shareable URL of the current chart on your clipboard, and Export CSV downloads the underlying data. On a small screen the page collapses to a single column: the preset rail, a summary chip bar that states the current chart in plain language, and the chart. An Underlying data button opens the table in a bottom sheet, and tapping a summary chip opens a bottom sheet to edit that one part of the chart. Copy link and Export CSV become icon buttons in the toolbar.

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Starting from a preset

The preset rail at the top of the content area is where most explorations begin. Pick a card to replace your current chart wholesale with an opinionated starting point. Six presets ship with the app:

• Income vs. expenses—monthly area chart of net flow over time.
• Spending by budget line—bar chart of this month’s spend, grouped by budget line, negative values only.
• Accounts over time—line chart with one line per account, tracking current balance month by month.
• Asset allocation—pie chart of every account with a non-zero balance. Positive-balance accounts (assets) and negative-balance accounts (liabilities, such as credit cards) render as two side-by-side pies.
• Month-over-month—overlay line chart comparing this month and last month, indexed by day-of-month so the lines align even though the calendar dates differ.
• Custom—an empty starting point with no series. Pick this when you want to build from scratch.

The selected preset stays highlighted in the rail. When your edits no longer match any preset, the rail shows Custom.

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Naming the chart

The Chart name field in the inspector sets the chart’s title. The value flows into the page toolbar and is also used as the filename when you export to CSV (spaces are replaced with underscores).

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Choosing the x-axis

In Chart setup, the Group by toggle chooses how the chart groups your data. It has two modes:

• Time—groups data into time buckets. Pick an aggregation: Daily, Weekly, Semi-monthly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly, Budget interval (your active budget cycle), or None (raw).
• Category—groups data by an entity type. Pick a category type: Account, Budget line, Business, Institution, or Item. For category mode you can also restrict the Include toggle to All, Positive, or Negative values, which is useful for separating spending from income on a budget-line breakdown.

If you switch to Category while the chart is a Line or Area, Explore automatically upgrades the chart to Bar so the chart still renders correctly.

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Defining series

The Series group controls what the chart actually plots. Each series is a card you can expand to edit. The header shows Series (N) so you always know how many you have. Inside a series card, set its name and pick a value type:

• Transaction amount—sums or aggregates transactions. This is the only value type that exposes an Aggregation control with Sum, Avg, Cumulative, and Count.
• Account balance (current) and Account balance (available)—point-in-time balances for accounts.
• Budget line activity—the running total of activity on a budget line.

Each series also has its own Series filter block—scoped to that series only—so you can compare accounts, budget lines, or time ranges side by side on the same chart. Click + Add series to add another. Remove a series with the × on its card.

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Adding filters

The Filters group narrows down the data feeding the entire chart. Click + Add filter to pick a filter type:

• Account, Budget line, Business, or Institution—entity filters that show a multi-select picker. New entity filters start with every matching entity already selected, so you remove what you don’t want rather than build a list from scratch.
• Time range—a predefined span: This week, Last week, This month, Last month, This year, or Last year.

When no filters are present, the group confirms that all transactions are included. Remove a filter row with its × button.

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Choosing a chart type

Chart setup also picks the visualization type. Available options depend on the x-axis mode:

• Time-based axes can render as Line, Area, or Bar.
• Category-based axes can render as Bar, Pie, or Donut.

Use Line for continuous trends, Area for net flows where you want positive and negative magnitudes filled in, Bar for discrete comparisons, and Pie or Donut for share-of-total breakdowns. Donut is a Pie variant—picking it sets the inner radius automatically. Pie and Donut are only offered on a Category axis—a single share-of-total slicing has no meaningful representation of a time series. If you switch the x-axis to Time while a Pie or Donut chart is active, Explore automatically downgrades the chart to Bar so it still renders correctly, mirroring the Line/Area → Bar upgrade in the other direction. When a Pie or Donut holds both positive and negative values, Explore splits it into two side-by-side pies—assets on the left, liabilities on the right—each sized by magnitude. A chart with only positive or only negative values stays a single pie. Zero-value slices are dropped so they don’t clutter the legend. When a chart is grouped by budget line, its bars and slices use the colors you’ve assigned to those budget lines—once you’ve set at least two different colors. Until then, Explore uses its built-in palette.

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Controlling the window and display

The Display group controls what range of data is shown and how the chart is decorated. For time-ordered axes, a two-thumb Window slider clips the chart to a range of periods, always keeping at least two periods in view when the data spans more than one period. The labels under each thumb show the period at that end of the range, and the help text reads Showing N periods. The default window covers the most recent 12 periods (or 31 for Daily aggregation). Changing the time aggregation resets the window back to the default. For pie charts on a categorical axis, the slider is replaced with a Show picker. Choose a direction (Top or Bottom) and a count (5, 10, 25, or All)—or type any number into the custom count field. The default is Top 10. The help text reads Showing the top N of M groups so you always know how many groups exist behind your slice. The same group also exposes display toggles, scoped to the current chart type and series count: Grid lines, X-axis labels, Y-axis labels, Legend, and Fit y-axis to data. Pies don’t show grid or axis toggles; the legend toggle only appears when the chart has more than one series. Fit y-axis to data appears on Line and Area charts. With the toggle off, the y-axis always includes zero, so the chart shows each value’s full size. Turn the toggle on to stretch the y-axis across only the range your data covers—an account that moves between $90,000 and$95,000 then fills the chart instead of a thin band at the top. Even with the toggle on, the y-axis includes zero when the data:

• Crosses zero.
• Stays flat, or moves by only a few cents.

Bar charts don’t offer the toggle and always include zero, because a bar’s length shows its value.

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Exporting and copying data

Copy link at the top of the inspector puts a shareable URL of the current chart on your clipboard—the chart’s definition rides in the URL, so opening the link reproduces the exact chart. The Export CSV button beside it downloads the visible chart data as a CSV file named after your Chart name value. The Copy button on the data table copies the same rows as TSV—paste it straight into Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers.

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What gets remembered

A few display preferences persist across visits, scoped to your device: the Grid lines, X-axis labels, Y-axis labels, Legend, and Fit y-axis to data toggles, plus the pie inner radius (Pie vs Donut). The chart definition itself—presets, series, filters, and chart type—is not saved between visits; pick a preset to start over, or rebuild the chart you want each time you open the page.