# A month in Tidings

> A five-minute, screenshot-led walk through one month of spending — journal, summary, budgets, insights, merchants.

Every screen below comes from the [live demo](https://gettidings.com/demo) — eleven months of a fictional household's spending. This is the shape of a month once the pipeline is wired: alerts arrive by email, parsers file them, and these pages assemble themselves.

## The journal

A month, read one day at a time, newest first. Each day carries its own total, and the month accumulates as you scroll. Only spending you can act on appears here — refunds, transfers, and anything you ignore stay in the full ledger.

[The journal →](/using/journal/)

## The summary

One page scoped to the month in the picker. The Flow view is a Sankey diagram of where the month went — income on one side, category groups on the other; toggle to Trend for the month against recent history. The headline sentence is assembled from the page's own figures, not written by a model.

[Summary →](/using/summary/)

## Budgets

Budgets are annual. You set a target per category, and the dashboard reads year-to-date spending against the elapsed fraction of the year — two months in, roughly a sixth of the year has passed. A separate ceiling caps total spending, and pace tells you whether the year is running ahead or behind.

[Budgets →](/using/budgets/)

## Insights

The monthly briefing workspace. The cards on top — momentum against last month, and the month's quiet anomalies — are computed directly from your transactions; no model is involved. The narrative below is AI-written and opt-in, follows the same fixed shape every month, and after generation every figure in it is traced back to the underlying numbers.

[Insights →](/using/insights/)

## Merchants

Who you pay, across the trailing six months. Recurring merchants are detected and typed — fixed, variable, lumpy — and the fixed ones sum to a recurring burn rate: the spending locked in before the month begins. Price changes, new merchants, and churned ones are surfaced alongside.

[Merchants →](/using/merchants/)

## Where next

- [Try the demo](https://gettidings.com/demo) — the same data, live, no install.
- [Quickstart](/quickstart/) — three commands and a browser tab.
- Or let an agent introduce you:

```text
Introduce me to Tidings. Read https://docs.gettidings.com/agent-guide.md, then use the live demo API to show me what a month of spending looks like.
```