By Gabriele Denaro · Published 16 July 2026 · Updated 6 October 2026
Is €42,000 a good number? It depends on where you were six months ago and where you are heading, and you only see that by comparing the same measurement, taken the same way, again and again. A single balance is a data point. A series of them is a story.
Twelve points a year are enough to see a direction and few enough to take in. Monthly is frequent enough to catch a real problem, such as an account that keeps shrinking or a salary that stopped arriving, and rare enough to ignore the daily wobble of markets. That is why Patrimony is built around a monthly entry instead of a live feed: the goal is the shape of the curve over a year, not your exact worth at 3 pm on a Tuesday.
Pick a fixed day, for example the last day of the month or the day after payday. Open each account, write down the balance and enter it. Use the same accounts and the same definitions every time. Rounding is fine: €12,340 and €12,300 tell the same story. Enter every account every month, so that a missing one does not look like a loss.
Twelve rough entries teach you more than two perfect ones. People who aim for perfection tend to skip the month when they are busy, and a skipped month is often exactly the one in which something went wrong. If you are short of time, enter the balances you can see in your banking apps and move on.
After a year the curve starts to answer real questions. Which months jump up, and why? How much of the change is your savings and how much is market movement? Did a big expense leave a visible dent? These answers are invisible in any single balance and obvious in twelve of them.
General educational information, not personal financial, tax or legal advice. It may be incomplete or out of date. Terms of use.