Before we left the UK, we built ourselves a spreadsheet. We knew that to maintain travel for two years on the budget we had in mind we would need to track what we were spending every day not just have a rough idea.
The sheet we built was a bit more than basic but nothing too fancy. It was somewhere to track what we were spending while travelling full-time. It had filters for countries and cities, a few graphs, spending categories, all the stuff you think you'll definitely keep perfectly updated once you're on the road.
And to be fair, we did.
For a while.
The problem wasn't the spreadsheet itself. The problem was the process around it. We'd pay for something, forget to log it, dump it into notes later, then eventually copy it into the spreadsheet days afterwards while trying to remember whether that £14 was fuel or lunch or some random Grab in Kuala Lumpur.
Which meant travel admin slowly started following us around.
Not in a dramatic way. Just constantly. Sitting there in the background while we were climbing mountains in Nepal or trying to decide if we had enough energy left for one more temple in Thailand.
The last thing you want after a full travel day is to spend an hour inside spreadsheets.
So we built something that removed most of that friction.
We didn't want five different travel systems anymore
Before this, everything lived in different places.
Trip ideas in notes. Bookings in emails. Expenses in spreadsheets. Tasks scattered across reminders and in instagram. Bec was mostly responsible for staying on top of it all, knowing exactly where we going and when, keeping notes of what we were spending and on what. While I ended up filtering spreadsheets trying to work out where the money had actually gone.
Even if you're organised, it gets messy surprisingly quickly.
Especially travelling long-term.
People imagine full-time travel as endless sunsets and cocktails but honestly a lot of it is logistics. Finding buses. Extending visas. Booking accommodation before somewhere sells out. Working out whether breakfast is included because nobody can remember anymore.
And because we travel fairly slowly, usually a month or more in one place, we wanted to spend more time actually living somewhere and less time managing the trip itself.
Not "optimising travel". Not turning trips into productivity exercises. Just reducing the amount of annoying admin attached to moving around the world.
The biggest blocker to expense tracking is how long it takes.
That's it.
If adding an expense becomes annoying, people stop doing it. Then they backdate things. Then the numbers become vague guesses. Then the whole system quietly dies.
So most of the build centred around making everything stupidly quick.
There's a single add expense button visible from anywhere in the app. After a bit of use we reckon you could genuinely log an expense in under five seconds.
To us that matters more than flashy features or gimmicks this has always been about how it works for us as genuine travel family.
Especially somewhere like Malaysia where your day ends up being twenty tiny purchases. Teas. Grabs. Snacks. Meals. More teas. If you don't create a habit and stay on top of expenses as you spend it its easy to lose stuff and within a week you're looking at each other wondering why you're having to withdraw money again.
We also became slightly obsessed with budgets. Not in a restrictive way, more in a "how long can we comfortably keep travelling like this?" way.
Some people want one total trip budget. Some want monthly budgets. Others want different budgets per country because Japan and Vietnam are obviously not the same financially.
So WayStaq handles all of that at once.
One thing we're oddly proud of is the "gory details" button. We personally don't want constant reminders that we're £11 over budget on a Tuesday afternoon. Not because the budget doesn't matter it's more, somedays you'll be over budget and other days you'll be under. We always wanted to know what is our average daily spend for the last week, or since we have been in this country.
Other travellers absolutely do need to know everything at all times. So now you can either keep things simple or stare directly into the financial abyss if whatever you're comfortable with and whatever helps you stay on track and more importantly feel in control.
Another thing we love is the ability to create shareable images displaying details of the trip. You can create these a the highest level covering the entire trip, at country level or at stop level. They display the average spending in that section along with up to five of the activities you loved the most. The image it produces is perfect for sharing on your stories and reels.
Realistically, we built the thing we wished existed
We didn't really set out to build an app.
We just kept running into the same problems over and over again and eventually thought, surely there's a cleaner way to do this.
We also deliberately avoided loads of stuff.
No GPS tracking following your every move around the map. No bank account integration. No trying to automatically scrape bookings from emails and occasionally getting it completely wrong. We've used enough tech over the years to know that clever features become annoying very quickly when they fail half the time.
We wanted something reliable instead.
Offline access became a huge part of that. The app works from your phone home screen even without signal, then syncs once you reconnect. Getting that stable was honestly one of the hardest parts of the build. We had several moments where we thought it was fixed and it absolutely was not.
What surprised us most was how much time it gave back.
Because the weird thing about travel admin is it expands quietly. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. Then suddenly you're spending chunks of your evening sorting receipts instead of actually talking to each other.
Jax has been involved in all of this from the start. Not accidentally, just because everything we do as a family tends to overlap. And honestly the best thing about the app is probably that it freed up more time to actually be together instead of endlessly maintaining systems.
Jax really enjoys clicking through the trip detail page
First you can click into any country on the trip and see all the stops(cities) in that country, then you click on a stop itself
Now you can see what happened in that stop how you got there, what hotel you're staying at and all the activities you enjoyed during that stop. This is a great way for Jax to look back over our trip so far and often sparks family discussions around remember when we did this or that.
It works best for travellers already trying to stay organised
This probably isn't useful for someone doing two weeks at an all-inclusive resort where everything's prepaid.
But if you're already tracking expenses, or trying to, you'll probably recognise the exact frustrations we had.
The duplicate entry. The forgotten expenses. The spreadsheet guilt hanging over you after three busy travel days.
Now we can pull up things instantly.
Three clicks and we know we spent £74 on fuel in Sri Lanka. Or somehow £84 on alcohol in Morocco, which still feels mildly surprising in hindsight.
It also helps massively with content because we can actually trust the data we're sharing instead of guessing.
Planning the next stages of the trip from the road.
Staying on top of the logistics of planning the next section of the trip becomes easier and methodical. the tasks tab becomes your best friend. first decide where you want to go next then add the tasks that you'll need to tick off before it can happen.
for example you know you want to go to Japan, you know roughly what dates and think you want to start in Tokyo. You would add Japan to your trip and set Tokyo as the first stop. Then start to create tasks such as 'Book flights to Tokyo', 'Find accommodation in Tokyo' Research activities in Tokyo'. You decide to start by looking at flights all you do is click the link in your 'book flights' task and it opens a window showing sky scanner bringing then trip details with it so dates travel party size to and from which airports so the prices display instantly on screen.
Once you buy a flight you mark the tasks as completed. You'll see a question asking what you paid this then adds the flight details to your trip section and the flights expense to your budget section. No unnecessary duplication of data entry. This then works exactly the same with booking.com through the accommodation task. You are of course free to use any sites for flights and accommodations these are just the ones we tend to use.
Mostly though, it's just calmer.
No wondering where the money's gone. No trying to remember if accommodation was already paid for. No searching through emails while standing outside a guesthouse with backpacks on.
A normal day for us now is opening the app maybe five or ten times. Usually quickly adding expenses straight after paying. Occasionally checking tasks. Looking at average spend over the last week so one expensive day doesn't suddenly feel catastrophic.
