Last Updated: July 2026
A Sankey diagram turns your finances into a picture: bands flow from left to right, and the width of each band is proportional to the dollars moving through it. Your income sources merge into one total, then split out into taxes, each spending category, savings, and whatever's left unallocated. In a single glance you can see what dominates your outflow, how thin (or fat) your savings stream is, and whether anything is left over — the same money-flow visual that regularly tops r/dataisbeautiful, but built in seconds instead of an afternoon with a spreadsheet.
Follow the flow left to right. On the left, each income source (salary, side gig, rental, dividends) is its own band feeding into the central "Total income" node. From there, money branches out: a band to taxes and deductions, one band per expense category, one to savings and investing, and an "Unallocated" band for anything you haven't assigned. The wider a band, the more money it carries. A healthy picture usually shows a visible savings band and a small or zero unallocated band; a large unallocated band means money is going somewhere you haven't accounted for.
The diagram is unit-agnostic: enter everything monthly or everything annually, as long as you're consistent. Monthly is easiest for budgeting conversations ("where does my paycheque go?"), while annual is better for a year-in-review picture that captures irregular items like bonuses or annual insurance. The shapes and proportions are identical either way — only the labels change.
A pie chart shows spending categories as slices of one total, but it hides the story of how money arrives and where it's diverted before you ever spend it. The Sankey shows the whole journey: multiple income sources combining, taxes taken off the top, and the split between spending and saving all in one connected flow. That's why it resonates — it makes the savings rate and the tax bite visible as physical widths, not just numbers, and it's genuinely satisfying to share.
This tool is stateless: your figures are sent to our server to compute the flow and returned, never saved. It visualizes exactly the numbers you type for one period — it doesn't verify them, estimate your taxes, or pull from your accounts. For a diagram built automatically from your real tracked income, expenses, and a proper Canadian tax estimate — plus a bar view and export — use the Cash Flow Waterfall inside a free TrackMoola account. When you share this calculator's result, you get a read-only link (and a rich social preview image) of your flow.
Was this calculator helpful?
Turn your income and spending into a shareable Sankey diagram. See exactly where every dollar flows — from each income source through taxes, expenses, and savings — the way r/dataisbeautiful posts do, without the spreadsheet work.
Popular tools and guides people use right after this one.