So I’m considering just using excel to keep track of all my expenses and income, but is there a better solution? What do you use to track how you spend money? I want something from which I can freely export the data if need be so excel is tempting.
I use YNAB
So do I, but it’s expensive for what it is. There’s a free version called Actual Budget which can be run off of a computer you control. Great for selfhosting.
I use Ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/, seems to not be available at the moment).
It is so-called plain-text accounting so it is as future proof as you can get it.
Are you trying to track expenses or budget? The difference is in how you’re using the data. Busgeting is a much more active process of making sure money is going to the right place. The difference is a deep topic that might be beyond the scope of your question so I’ll leave it at that for now.
For budgeting, the gold standard is still YNAB. There are plenty of valid criticisms to level against it but I’ve done a lot of research and tried out a lot of tools and it’s still the best.
I am keeping a close eye on ActualBudget. It’s not ready for me yet, personally, but they’re doing fantastic work with that project. If you don’t mind a little extra technical maintenance (barely any with PikaPods as another comment suggested), it can get you a long way. Notably, this is the most private recommendation I can make. Since you run your own instance and it’s open-source software, you can tell exactly what its doing with your data. Automatic bank import is available but not required or pushed on you.
If you’re interested more in tracking, Mint used to be the easiest tool to get into. Unfortunately with it shut down, I’m not aware of any similar replacements. If I were looking for more of a tracking and reporting tool, I would probably import my bank data into a spreadsheet and go from there. I think there might be a gap in the market here (though I also think there were a lot of Mint users who really needed a budgeting tool and, IMO, it wasn’t very good for that).
I’ve started looking at PocketGuard which might be a good replacement for Mint and fit your needs. I can’t speak much about it myself yet but it looks interesting.
I’ll second YNAB, been using it for like 6 years and it’s the only thing that’s kept us on track while undercompensated
I use libreoffice calc. I don’t manually enter stuff though, I just export csv from my bank web interface. (I don’t use cash much, so am not worried about tracking those few transactions)
I’d probably be too lazy to use anything that required me to update it for every transaction.
That’s what we do too. Calc works great.
I just watch my accounts.
“I over spent my income last month. Gotta cut back some this month to compensate.” Or “I have a bunch extra in my checking account, I can splurge on that thing I’ve wanted.”Me too. The app of my bank even has a graph per account. It helps keeping an eye on them.
But I also have virtual budgets in my head like “try to stay under 100€ per month for gaming and gambling” or “food for one person shouldn’t exceed 50€ per day and usually be less than 5€ per meal”
this is basically me but its basically stay to a minimum and decide what we want to do if we are actually ahead.
Google docs. I made a custom dashboard that I manually enter each transaction with a category for each entry, and it tracks current balance, category budgets, etc. I also have a separate tab for credit card debt, payment dates, previous month spending displayed on graphs, etc. I have tried automated solutions like YNAB, but it always ends up getting desynced from my bank account and becomes inaccurate eventually, leading to require manual updates anyway. This manual system is something I stay on top of every day, and has helped me inform my daily financial decisions pretty well.
Same, but Excel for me.
I haven’t tried automated solutions, only manually putting stuff into a spreadsheet and it works great for me. Lots of automated calculations and such in there though so I can get stats at a glance.
It takes me an hour or so each week, plus an extra hour each month, plus an additional hour each year (since I update certain things monthly and yearly), but it really helps me stay on top of my budget/financial goals etc.
I use GnuCash, because it’s the only FOSS accounting package I’ve found that sensibly handles transactions that involve more than two accounts (aka “splits”) at a time. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you’re new to double-entry accounting, but it does support CSV import, can manually reconcile its records to whatever statement period you want, and can export to graphs or spreadsheets as needed. While highly capable, it can be used for simple cash-flow management as well.
It is, however, strictly a desktop app, and is wholly a separate endeavour to *GnuCash for Android". That said, one reason that I’ve continued to use GnuCash for the better part of a decade is because the UI basically doesn’t change. There’s not much room for enshittification when it’s all GTK-based. Anything else I want from this program, I can do using Python by crunching the data exported as a CSV file.
EDIT: to put into concrete terms why multi-split transactions are useful, I will offer two examples. The first is about granularity of expenses, such as a day at the thrift store. If I’ve acquired some home decor, a vintage shirt, and a trinket for my bicycle, then I would want to record the transaction as such:
- Assets:Cash: -$32
- Expenses:Home Furnishings: +$20
- Expenses:Clothes: +$7
- Expenses:Bicycle: +$5
This does take extra effort to break down into each expense category, but how granular you make your expenses is up to you. Certainly, some transactions wholly fall into one expense category (eg McDonalds as Expenses:Dining) and so there’s no big effort there.
The second example is about multiple money flows as part of the same logical action. Suppose that I treat my credit card as though it’s a debit card – to live within my means – and every time that I use the credit card, I move an equal amount of money from my checking account into my savings account, precisely to pay off the credit card bill at month’s end. This is how the transaction might look:
- Assets:Checking: -$67
- Assets:Savings: +$67
- Liabilities:Credit Card:American Express: -$67
- Expenses:Entertainment: +$67
When it comes time to reconcile (aka “balance my checkbook”), I can do that for each account, one at a time. So my checking account statement is reconciled to Assets:Checking, my savings account to Assets:Savings, and my American Express credit card statement reconciled to Liabilities:Credit Card:American Express. These can happen on their own cadence, since while the bank accounts might end on a calendar month, credit cards often use their own statement dates.
This seems like a lot of data entry, but seeing as GnuCash helpfully finds and clones fields when manually entering a new transaction, it’s almost like a copy/paste followed by a bit of cleanup. In my regular workflow, my typical transactions have two splits. The most irregular transaction I’ve ever created had 28 splits, because it involved donations to multiple charitable causes, split across cash, checks, credit cards, and US Treasury bonds (which paid interest upon withdrawal, and so had to be accounted as well).
GnuCash.
Fantastic software. I have every single transaction from the last ~8 years recorded in GnuCash. Highly recommend!
Upvotes and a reply because gnucash does it all.
The one GnuCash weakness is cost basis accounting. I use LibreOffice Calc for that.
Technically it can do some of that but it often not general enough.
Just a spreadsheet, nothing fancy. Right now using Google Docs but it could easily be some other spreadsheet app (LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, etc.).
These sort of things just need to be something you understand and follow for your own use. Way back I started out trying to track finances with Quicken but in the end I found it way too complicated for what I needed and hated the idea of my data being locked in their specific format. And I didn’t even need any of the fancy stuff like syncing with bank accounts/credit cards.
Mine is pretty simple, the main columns represent each month of the year, top group of rows represent different income sources, followed by a group of rows representing non-discretionary expenses, followed by a group of rows representing discretionary expenses. Then totals at the bottom. Works for me.
Actual Budget hosted on PikaPods
Google sheet. It’s not the most “libre” solution but I can easily add items from my phone, share with my SO, and it is exportable to CSV which I view as the actual archival format.
Been doing this since January (tracking every $ we spend) and towards the end of the year I plan to import into a local DB server so I can run some reports and see where we could improve.
I have a spreadsheet.
Each month I check the balances of all my accounts (eg: savings, checking, vanguard). If anything looks unusual, I go investigate and make a note of what happened. (Eg: bought expensive boots here, moved money from this account to that account). If I was doing that a lot, I’d probably change something about my routine.
I used to export all the transactions from the bank websites and import them, but I found I wasn’t really using that data.
It helps that I’m naturally very frugal, and don’t have a lot of expenses.
I use an iOS app called Pennyworth and export from that to spreadsheets on my computer (sadly it looks like there’s a half dozen apps with the same name now). It’s relatively convenient to log everything manually in, and it has a few handy data breakdowns, but it all goes into an offline spreadsheet with all the silly calculations my heart desires. It’s not a subscription. It has budgeting features but I don’t use those. I don’t think the UI is particularly intuitive for people who dislike calendar views, but once it clicks it’s pretty logically laid out.
I want to refine the spreadsheet side, and I wanted to post to one of these comms with a similar question recently to see what others are doing, but that’s how I do it. At one point I wanted to move the spreadsheet side to a Google Doc or something similar that I can access from my phone, but I’m less inclined to upload personal information to Google these days. I think I have an encrypted zipped backup of an older version of that spreadsheet backed up there but that’s about it.
My bank doesn’t let me export anything and besides I live in the third world where (for better or for worse) we use cash for almost everything. So it’s no surprise my method is built around something that makes the manual record-keeping process faster and easier.
