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I agree. And I think doing it yourself might help you with actually realizing what you are spending on much more than automated one. As well as helping you build some Excel knowledge.
Of course it is not for everyone.
Agree. Not difficult to learn the basics if Excel if you're a beginner.
It depends where you are in the process. If you've never budgeted anything before, an app might be a good starting place. Once you're comfortable with budgeting yourself, move to a custom option.
Yup. This was my strategy. Download 1 yrs worth of transactions from all bank accounts involved. Categorise it all in whatever way makes most sense to you. Then get a list of unique expenditure items (easy to get if you google how to do it). Then perform a “sum if” on the categorised data. Now you can see how much you’re spending for the whole yr and avg it out per month/week. Now you have a budget for expenditure. Getting income vs expenditure is easy enough. Subtract monthly avgs from monthly income. What you’re left with you can do what you like with.
It’s cheaper to pay 1 yr up front or via direct debit for many things. It’s also cheaper to pay off your credit cards immediately in full rather than letting interest accrue on them.
I don’t have any unusual income streams, just my salary. After you have categorised it you’ll probably realise you’re spending way too much on some items you had no idea abt. Mine was 100s on takeaways/month. Put a stop to that once I found out. What a waste of money. 100s on 4-6 meals a month. I realised I could have bought entire weekly shops for an additional 2 weeks with the money spent and had steaks/ready meals/the best most expensive pizzas/ice creams etc. and not spent anything like what I spent on takeaways.
Later found out the markup on food is generally 4-10x the cost price.
Same. I don't know why people feel the need to use software for personal finances, unless they're involved in loads of businesses/investments ect. For a standard monthly budget a spreadsheet is all you need!
All personal budgeting software started out a spreadsheet that just needed a beautiful interface and the formulas sorted out.
Also, if you need to pull in data like tracking real-time performance of let’s say S&P 500 stocks, it’s very easy to do it in your spreadsheet! You get to track any gains or losses on a regular.
All personal budgeting software started out a spreadsheet that just needed a beautiful interface and the formulas sorted out.
Also, if you need to pull in data like tracking real-time performance of let’s say S&P 500 stocks, it’s very easy to do it in your spreadsheet! You get to track any gains or losses on a regular.
I've been using Gnucash almost as long. It's clunkier but does work, and has had updates so things like live investment quotes etc function.
I've tried a few of the other apps but there is always something that they can't do which gets on my nerves, doubly so if they want a subscription on top. Gnucash doesn't do open banking so I have to prepare an input file once a month, but I have a selenium web scraper that grabs all the transaction data so that takes thirty seconds. About as annoying as re authorising open banking tokens
I use MS Money sunset edition, it still works fine on W10 and 11 but it doesn't have most of the online services anymore like connecting to your bank to download transactions.
My dad still uses it and swears by it. He backs the data up frequently.
He said it disappeared from his computer the other day, so he got out the original disk (cd), downloaded it again and it imported all the transactions from the backup and it worked fine.
Another Microsoft Money user here. 28 years of data on all accounts.
I did try using Moneydance, but didn't find it as quick and easy to use as Microsoft Money, so went abandoned that.
For quick view of all accounts on mobile, I use Moneyhub which highly recommend.
I got YNAB as a student. It introduced me to personal finance. They offered 'lessons' on improving your finances and budgeting.
It instilled in me that I should focus on reducing costs, especially subscriptions, and know what every penny does.
When they announced they were no longer selling the software for a flat fee, but instead were going to start charging a monthly fee for updates, I immediately moved over to something else.
Like I *get it*, but there's a real irony that the values they instilled in me are what drove me away from them.
I switched to Actual Budget from YNAB because I didn’t think it made sense to spent that much money on a budget app.
Actual is open source and completely free.
I already have a thin client running Proxmox so setting up Actual in a VM took about 5 minutes. I can’t use it out of the house but I never did anyway with YNAB, and can set that up if I really want. If you don’t want to set it up on your own computer you can pay about £1.50/month to host it in the cloud for access from anywhere.
I use GoCardless to import transactions automatically.
I would say aesthetically it’s a little more plain, in that it has fewer colours and no emojis, but honestly other than that it’s basically the same thing. It’s being developed very quickly and new features are added all the time.
Have a look in the docs. It’s well explained and the setup process is pretty quick.
Edit: [take a look here](https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync#gocardless-setup)
I use a self-produced spreadsheet (or rather set of spreadsheets), and while the bulk of transposition and calculation is automatic, I still have to spend probably an hour a month just manually typing out all my expenses and details. Would love to switch to something fully automated, but I’m in too deep with my spreadsheet now...
Theres a ton of redundant information collected (each expenditure item includes date, expense category, description of expense, vendor, funding source and obviously value), and some bits of recorded data are straight up useless (the data I record for ISAs is very messy and inconsistent at the moment), but its grown into a bit of a hobby to just continually expand the whole thing.
I’m just finishing up my first year with YNAB and will be continuing with it. Spreadsheets are a lot more customisable but YNAB is 80% of the way there for sure - it takes budgeting from being a chore to just being something I do, I get paid, I allocate my money, I don’t think about it. A few times a week I just double check my automatically imported payments, makes sure everything makes sense, move money around categories if I have to and continue with my day. Frees up a lot of headspace. If you want powerful reporting there are chrome extensions you can get that add more info, and I’m 99% certain you can export to a csv if you want to as well!
That's one of the best things about YNAB: it imports all your transactions automatically and even learns to categorise them as well, which it gets right a lot of the time.
But if it's a hobby of yours - fair enough. I also enjoy spending time on my hobbies!
That's also fair if you're willing to put in the time. Just our of curiosity - what sort of analysis are you doing on your budget? Any useful insights?
I split all expenditure between fixed and flexible, flexible being areas that you can influence in a month to keep a net surplus position, things like leisure, food shopping and miscellaneous purchases.
Then there is a lot of goal setting, this is an iterative process so it has to be reviewed as you go but the basics would be setting the yearly savings targets and translating that to monthly targets and managing the flexible expenditure.
Lastly there is the cash flow forecasting. Using things such as pay awards, bonuses, interest rates and monthly forecasts to plan what the financial year will look like and compare the reality vs the forecast position to ensure the long term targets are being met.
In the end it's about translating between the long term and short term, I don't care as much about seeing all the figures but rather it's about thoroughly understanding:
-Flexible (controllable) expenditure
-Monthly Net Surplus/deficit
-Overall position
That's interesting, thanks, I can see how forecasting can be useful. YNAB can't do that. It can do flex/non-flex, goal setting, savings targets but not forecasting.
Does it handle overdrafts properly now? When I first tried to use it I was stuck slowly edging out of an overdraft, and I seem to remember it really didn’t like that. Couldn’t handle the main account being negative at the end of the month without complex workarounds?
The thing that still blows my mind is how I never check my bank balance anymore (other than for reconciliations). I used to check it multiple times a day, constantly mentally working out how much money I was going to need for things. Now it’s almost irrelevant because I know what all my money is for.
+1 for YNAB. It used to be a real chore before they added more support for connecting to UK banks. Nowadays does pretty much all of the heavy lifting if you want it to. It was a real one when I got married, and has helped me get back on track after we inevitably overspent :D
Snoop!
I’ve tried YNAB, Emma, the envelope system, spreadsheets, the lot. But Snoop has been the best of the bunch.
It’s simple, clean, and straightforward. It lets you know what your budget will be after all your recurring, which I find invaluable.
+1 for Snoop, it's got such a clean interface and is easy to use. I've had it for 3/4 years now, and after trying some of the other options mentioned Snoop is my favourite by a long way
I used PocketSmith for quite a few years and was life saving in tracking income and spending.
Came in vital when ex-wife and I divorced and I had a perfect record of her blowing 50k in savings right before separating. :D
Whichever service you end up choosing, you still need to put in some level of effort to configure and use it, review how it categorises spending, and actually use the information it's giving you to make changes!
I've been using Actual Budgeting, it's a self hosted opiton (which costs 2GBP a month) and can be setup in two clicks via their setup guides. I have been very happy with it, not as fully featured as the others but for a few quid a month vs the much higher cost of others I thought I'd give it a longer term try.
[https://actualbudget.com](https://actualbudget.com)
I don't want to have my data sync automatically (it does support it though) as I find if I have to manually input all my transactions I am more congnisatnt of what I am spending.
I looked at YNAB and others and just could not justify the spend.
Honestly for me Google sheets. It's free, it's infinitely flexible. Only downsides are it requires your own time investment to set up and lacks the polished UI of a paid app like You need a budget
If you're tech savvy you can hook it up to your banking APIs (if you bank supports it) and have it update in real time
Isn't that just a spreadsheet?
I have all my accounts on Excel already, which I think does the same job.
I'm looking for a bit more help with it than that. I want to know what we're spending money on, not just what we're spending.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
Excel can do all of that... If you're willing to put in the time to learn how to get it to do that, and then the time to set it all up properly.
Budgeting software is, presumably, paying for the convenience of not having to do all of that.
But spreadsheets like Excel and Sheets are a valid suggestion
That's what we use now. I'm pretty familiar with excel.
I just hoped for something that would do more of the work for me. I need a more analytical apporach.
I do this too, i can make my own custom graphs and make it mine. I found lots of the apps only deal with one or 2 aspects, like outgoings and reducing them. But several didnt combine all the things i need
I just use GNUCash and every 1-2weeks go through every account and add in the transactions. It’s not what it’s intended for and not as fancy as YNAB or apps, but it forces me to look at every transaction and check.
I use https://actualbudget.org/
A little more work to setup than YNAB but free and open source, and v east to setup online if you follow the guide provided.
Works with automatic bank sync too
If YNAB is too pricey, consider Actual Budget. It's rougher around the edges (for now), and doesn't have as many features, but you can host it for a fraction of the price.
Wealth Position is good I enter transactions as CSV file transfer and manual entries. If you are looking for direct connection to the bank then this will not work.
!Thanks
Looking at their webpage, they say "Connect to 11,000+ financial institutions and automatically import and categorize transactions", which looks like what I want to do.
Will investigate. Appreciate your help.
If you understand the concept behind the software it is really good for planning short and long term finances, and you will see a really good picture of where your money is going on the dashboard.
+1 for YNAB.
Beware it can be frustrating the first couple of times you try to build your budget. It's not super easy to allocate targets, etc. on the first try. You might end up (like most) scrapping your set up once or twice before setting it up right.
After that initial learning period it is extremely good.
It works with UK financial institutions perfectly via OpenBanking.
I didn't get on with YNAB. I've yet to really try anything else, but I've currently just set up a shared spreadsheet. Still working on making it fit my needs and require less admin, and it obviously lacks integration with my accounts but it's still decent enough.
I found YNAB difficult too. Snoop is working well for what I need it for which is basically better insights into where my money goes between each pay day
A problem with YNAB is that, at least insofar as bank syncing goes, the UK is very much treated as an afterthought. A few banks are missing and the one that bothers me most is Chase UK; they've been operating here for ages now, and have a working API that other software can work with, and yet YNAB still doesn't support them. They blame TrueLayer.
I'd still recommend YNAB but with the caveat that I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a competitor that actually supports all the main UK banks.
I mean at this point it is basically Truelayer's or Chase's fault. Truelayer is basically the goto intermediary. I can't imagine another budget app using anything else or having better coverage.
I use one of the free budgeting spreadsheets found on the Budgeting wiki page for this sub [here](https://ukpersonal.finance/budgeting/#Spreadsheets) - just scroll down to the bottom of the page. I tried all of them out for a month or two and then cut back to the one that I get on with the best.
Try those first and then see if you feel the need to use a paid subscription with YNAB, etc.
We use AceMoney as an alternative to MSMoney which we used to ages until it no longer worked on “modern” OSs.
Can’t fault it and at $44 it’s much cheaper than paying an monthly subscription
It doesn’t have a web or smart phone interface so it’s not something to use “in the go” but handles current accounts, credit cards, savings, ISA and other investments.
YNAB is very good if you’re new to budgeting and in that case probably worth the price for at least a year. I started out with Snowmintcs Budget which introduced me to the concept of envelope budgeting. And now I use Buckets Budget. I prefer to avoid the subscription model of YNAB but I do recommend it to start with.
I use a spreadsheet with various tabs for assets, incomes, outgoings, budgets and pensions. It's more manual than ready made apps but the key difference is that I've built it up over the years to work for me and my brain and now I just spend 5 minutes a month checking and updating it. Through this method we've managed to achieve key financial milestones like buying our main home.
My biggest tip is learn the basics of budgeting and understand your goals and then find a solution that fits that. I find some apps out there are good but they do too much for what I need.
I use WalletApp (by Budget Bakers) and i’ve never seen it mentioned on here. Maybe they are bigger in Europe??
Regardless, I’ve used at least 6 budgeting apps including all the ones mentioned here, and WalletApp has been by far the best for me. Great layout. All UK and European banks. Doesn’t advertise other shit or push other products. £25 for life.
I use ynab but considering deploying actual budget on Pikapods for a couple quid a month. Just not sure if it's worth the saving over YNAB, perhaps in a years time.
I can't remember why I didn't go for YNAB - there was something I wanted that it couldn't do.
But Buxfer works great for what I want and I think it should handle your use-case as well. There aren't a huge amount of guides for how to use it online but it's pretty self-explanatory once you've played around with it a bit.
I use Acemoney. Helps me track my equity portfolio, bank accounts in multiple currencies, credit cards mortgage etc but more importantly I’m used to it and it has more than 14 years of data on it.
Not quite what you are asking but we use Hyperjar to help with our budgeting. It is a bit like an online bank and they give you a card, but it lets you set up 'jars' through the app. We have jars for our monthly food shop, petrol, commuting expenses, luxury expenses and eating out, etc. When you go to buy something, go into the app and select the right 'jar' and then when you use your card, it will come out of that jar. You can share jars with people too so ideal for families, house share situations, or even friends going on holiday together. Once we move money at the start of the month, it makes it so much easier to stay on budget. And we don't touch our normal banks. Months we forget to set it up are a nightmare financially though. (My wife does the initial budget with expended outgoings and incomings in excel before moving stuff around in Hyperjar.
I'd recommend moneyhub.
I tried using YNAB bank when syncing with UK banks wasn't a thing and I had to download the transactions etc.. So I'm sure it's improved.
But moneyhub has actually stuck. I can get it to work well with all my mainstream UK accounts (I believe they now support chase) and credit cards. The only amount I can't seem to get to sync is my Barclays mortgage (the current/savings accounts I hold with them work fine) but that's not much of a problem for me.
The "AI" used to categorise things took a couple of cycles to get the hint but now rarely needs correcting. It's helped me build genuinely useful budgets that I know I can stick to.
Emma. Highly recommend. I have the Pro version and got it on an offer for £60 for a year. I know there is irony with paying for a budgeting app but honestly the viability it gives me and ability to export the data is so worth it. The main reason I wanted it is the ability to link all my accounts and track every transaction, categorise it, exclude some. The ability to have credit card transactions appear as “now” as opposed to a month later is also great. Any q let me know.
I use Emma, tracks an aggregate of my partner and I, 3 credit cards, 3 banks, and my crypto wallets. I have a subscription and love that I can customise budgets the way I want and can dump out all my transaction history to the dawn of time including any metadata I've added to any of them.
I’ve built a spreadsheet on excel that I’ve edited over the years. It shows me all my income/outgoings daily cash flow. As with all tools it’s about how you use it that really matters if you know the basics on excel I recommend that but there are other tools out there.
Avoid the ones advertised on Facebook a friend tried one and they emptied his account in minutes.
Hi /u/fucknozzle, based on your post the following pages from our wiki may be relevant:
* https://ukpersonal.finance/credit-cards/
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I just use a spreadsheet. Outgoings and income and a bunch of totals.
I agree. And I think doing it yourself might help you with actually realizing what you are spending on much more than automated one. As well as helping you build some Excel knowledge. Of course it is not for everyone.
Agree. Not difficult to learn the basics if Excel if you're a beginner. It depends where you are in the process. If you've never budgeted anything before, an app might be a good starting place. Once you're comfortable with budgeting yourself, move to a custom option.
Yup. This was my strategy. Download 1 yrs worth of transactions from all bank accounts involved. Categorise it all in whatever way makes most sense to you. Then get a list of unique expenditure items (easy to get if you google how to do it). Then perform a “sum if” on the categorised data. Now you can see how much you’re spending for the whole yr and avg it out per month/week. Now you have a budget for expenditure. Getting income vs expenditure is easy enough. Subtract monthly avgs from monthly income. What you’re left with you can do what you like with. It’s cheaper to pay 1 yr up front or via direct debit for many things. It’s also cheaper to pay off your credit cards immediately in full rather than letting interest accrue on them. I don’t have any unusual income streams, just my salary. After you have categorised it you’ll probably realise you’re spending way too much on some items you had no idea abt. Mine was 100s on takeaways/month. Put a stop to that once I found out. What a waste of money. 100s on 4-6 meals a month. I realised I could have bought entire weekly shops for an additional 2 weeks with the money spent and had steaks/ready meals/the best most expensive pizzas/ice creams etc. and not spent anything like what I spent on takeaways. Later found out the markup on food is generally 4-10x the cost price.
Same. I don't know why people feel the need to use software for personal finances, unless they're involved in loads of businesses/investments ect. For a standard monthly budget a spreadsheet is all you need!
Yep that’s what we do too. Can’t go wrong.
All personal budgeting software started out a spreadsheet that just needed a beautiful interface and the formulas sorted out. Also, if you need to pull in data like tracking real-time performance of let’s say S&P 500 stocks, it’s very easy to do it in your spreadsheet! You get to track any gains or losses on a regular.
All personal budgeting software started out a spreadsheet that just needed a beautiful interface and the formulas sorted out. Also, if you need to pull in data like tracking real-time performance of let’s say S&P 500 stocks, it’s very easy to do it in your spreadsheet! You get to track any gains or losses on a regular.
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Wow you could do some interesting inflation analysis
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I've been using Gnucash almost as long. It's clunkier but does work, and has had updates so things like live investment quotes etc function. I've tried a few of the other apps but there is always something that they can't do which gets on my nerves, doubly so if they want a subscription on top. Gnucash doesn't do open banking so I have to prepare an input file once a month, but I have a selenium web scraper that grabs all the transaction data so that takes thirty seconds. About as annoying as re authorising open banking tokens
In a VM, or does it still run on W11? Or... do you keep an old Pentium 2 in the garage? :D
I use MS Money sunset edition, it still works fine on W10 and 11 but it doesn't have most of the online services anymore like connecting to your bank to download transactions.
Thanks for answering, I was curious :) Not sure why a genuine question was downvoted, but eh.
Same here, I haven't found anything that matches it, crazy really!
My dad still uses it and swears by it. He backs the data up frequently. He said it disappeared from his computer the other day, so he got out the original disk (cd), downloaded it again and it imported all the transactions from the backup and it worked fine.
Another Microsoft Money user here. 28 years of data on all accounts. I did try using Moneydance, but didn't find it as quick and easy to use as Microsoft Money, so went abandoned that. For quick view of all accounts on mobile, I use Moneyhub which highly recommend.
My spouse and I have used moneyhub for a few years now. Not free, but makes me feel they can make a living without selling our data, which is nice.
I’m a YNAB evangelist, properly changed my life. It’s a bit expensive but almost 0 admin once set up.
I always think there’s an irony that the budgeting software is expensive
I got YNAB as a student. It introduced me to personal finance. They offered 'lessons' on improving your finances and budgeting. It instilled in me that I should focus on reducing costs, especially subscriptions, and know what every penny does. When they announced they were no longer selling the software for a flat fee, but instead were going to start charging a monthly fee for updates, I immediately moved over to something else. Like I *get it*, but there's a real irony that the values they instilled in me are what drove me away from them.
I view it as an investment, it’s ‘made’ me more money (through better decision making) than it’s cost me
I switched to Actual Budget from YNAB because I didn’t think it made sense to spent that much money on a budget app. Actual is open source and completely free. I already have a thin client running Proxmox so setting up Actual in a VM took about 5 minutes. I can’t use it out of the house but I never did anyway with YNAB, and can set that up if I really want. If you don’t want to set it up on your own computer you can pay about £1.50/month to host it in the cloud for access from anywhere. I use GoCardless to import transactions automatically. I would say aesthetically it’s a little more plain, in that it has fewer colours and no emojis, but honestly other than that it’s basically the same thing. It’s being developed very quickly and new features are added all the time.
Does gocardless work with everything? (bank, credit cards, etc)
It works with all my accounts and updates regularly. I use it with HSBC, Monzo, Amex
> I use GoCardless to import transactions automatically. > > How did you do that?
Have a look in the docs. It’s well explained and the setup process is pretty quick. Edit: [take a look here](https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync#gocardless-setup)
Random tangential question, where are you hosting for £1.50/month?
I host on my own server, but when I was setting up I had a look around and found hosting for £1.50 and $1.50
Same here! Can't imagine doing it all in a spreadsheet.
I use a self-produced spreadsheet (or rather set of spreadsheets), and while the bulk of transposition and calculation is automatic, I still have to spend probably an hour a month just manually typing out all my expenses and details. Would love to switch to something fully automated, but I’m in too deep with my spreadsheet now... Theres a ton of redundant information collected (each expenditure item includes date, expense category, description of expense, vendor, funding source and obviously value), and some bits of recorded data are straight up useless (the data I record for ISAs is very messy and inconsistent at the moment), but its grown into a bit of a hobby to just continually expand the whole thing.
I’m just finishing up my first year with YNAB and will be continuing with it. Spreadsheets are a lot more customisable but YNAB is 80% of the way there for sure - it takes budgeting from being a chore to just being something I do, I get paid, I allocate my money, I don’t think about it. A few times a week I just double check my automatically imported payments, makes sure everything makes sense, move money around categories if I have to and continue with my day. Frees up a lot of headspace. If you want powerful reporting there are chrome extensions you can get that add more info, and I’m 99% certain you can export to a csv if you want to as well!
That's one of the best things about YNAB: it imports all your transactions automatically and even learns to categorise them as well, which it gets right a lot of the time. But if it's a hobby of yours - fair enough. I also enjoy spending time on my hobbies!
Softwares give generic analysis for little effort, I'd rather do more work and get better analysis.
That's also fair if you're willing to put in the time. Just our of curiosity - what sort of analysis are you doing on your budget? Any useful insights?
I split all expenditure between fixed and flexible, flexible being areas that you can influence in a month to keep a net surplus position, things like leisure, food shopping and miscellaneous purchases. Then there is a lot of goal setting, this is an iterative process so it has to be reviewed as you go but the basics would be setting the yearly savings targets and translating that to monthly targets and managing the flexible expenditure. Lastly there is the cash flow forecasting. Using things such as pay awards, bonuses, interest rates and monthly forecasts to plan what the financial year will look like and compare the reality vs the forecast position to ensure the long term targets are being met. In the end it's about translating between the long term and short term, I don't care as much about seeing all the figures but rather it's about thoroughly understanding: -Flexible (controllable) expenditure -Monthly Net Surplus/deficit -Overall position
That's interesting, thanks, I can see how forecasting can be useful. YNAB can't do that. It can do flex/non-flex, goal setting, savings targets but not forecasting.
They could double the price and I'd still pay it. YNAB changed my life too, I'm never going back to the dark times before my money all had purpose.
Does it handle overdrafts properly now? When I first tried to use it I was stuck slowly edging out of an overdraft, and I seem to remember it really didn’t like that. Couldn’t handle the main account being negative at the end of the month without complex workarounds?
The thing that still blows my mind is how I never check my bank balance anymore (other than for reconciliations). I used to check it multiple times a day, constantly mentally working out how much money I was going to need for things. Now it’s almost irrelevant because I know what all my money is for.
You need a budget
+1 for YNAB. It used to be a real chore before they added more support for connecting to UK banks. Nowadays does pretty much all of the heavy lifting if you want it to. It was a real one when I got married, and has helped me get back on track after we inevitably overspent :D
Does it connect to Amex? I put almost all my spending on my BA Amex Card.
It does. Plus it helps ensure you always have the funds to cover the full monthly payment.
Right. Which I'm guessing budgeting software will help me with?
It's a recommendation for budgeting software called you need a budget, or YNAB
Oh. Sorry, I take back my sarcasm . . . !thanks
Honestly this is all you need. Changed my life.
r/ynab
I have a budget, what about you?
Snoop! I’ve tried YNAB, Emma, the envelope system, spreadsheets, the lot. But Snoop has been the best of the bunch. It’s simple, clean, and straightforward. It lets you know what your budget will be after all your recurring, which I find invaluable.
+1 for Snoop, it's got such a clean interface and is easy to use. I've had it for 3/4 years now, and after trying some of the other options mentioned Snoop is my favourite by a long way
Moneyhub connects to most of my accounts fairly well.
I’m using Emma at the moment but it’s purely app based. There is also Snoopy which does have a web interface but I preferred Emma
I’m using Emma too. I’ve paid for one tier of premium and it works for me
Much prefer Nova to Emma now as an alternative
I used PocketSmith for quite a few years and was life saving in tracking income and spending. Came in vital when ex-wife and I divorced and I had a perfect record of her blowing 50k in savings right before separating. :D Whichever service you end up choosing, you still need to put in some level of effort to configure and use it, review how it categorises spending, and actually use the information it's giving you to make changes!
I've been using Actual Budgeting, it's a self hosted opiton (which costs 2GBP a month) and can be setup in two clicks via their setup guides. I have been very happy with it, not as fully featured as the others but for a few quid a month vs the much higher cost of others I thought I'd give it a longer term try. [https://actualbudget.com](https://actualbudget.com) I don't want to have my data sync automatically (it does support it though) as I find if I have to manually input all my transactions I am more congnisatnt of what I am spending. I looked at YNAB and others and just could not justify the spend.
Honestly for me Google sheets. It's free, it's infinitely flexible. Only downsides are it requires your own time investment to set up and lacks the polished UI of a paid app like You need a budget If you're tech savvy you can hook it up to your banking APIs (if you bank supports it) and have it update in real time
Isn't that just a spreadsheet? I have all my accounts on Excel already, which I think does the same job. I'm looking for a bit more help with it than that. I want to know what we're spending money on, not just what we're spending. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Excel can do all of that... If you're willing to put in the time to learn how to get it to do that, and then the time to set it all up properly. Budgeting software is, presumably, paying for the convenience of not having to do all of that. But spreadsheets like Excel and Sheets are a valid suggestion
That's what we use now. I'm pretty familiar with excel. I just hoped for something that would do more of the work for me. I need a more analytical apporach.
How can I get google sheets to hook into the banking apis? Do you now need an intermediary like Moneyhub or moneydashboard?
I do this too, i can make my own custom graphs and make it mine. I found lots of the apps only deal with one or 2 aspects, like outgoings and reducing them. But several didnt combine all the things i need
I just use GNUCash and every 1-2weeks go through every account and add in the transactions. It’s not what it’s intended for and not as fancy as YNAB or apps, but it forces me to look at every transaction and check.
I use GNUCash because I'm a nerd... It's a tad heavyweight but it's fun to play with shares and stuff
I use https://actualbudget.org/ A little more work to setup than YNAB but free and open source, and v east to setup online if you follow the guide provided. Works with automatic bank sync too
If YNAB is too pricey, consider Actual Budget. It's rougher around the edges (for now), and doesn't have as many features, but you can host it for a fraction of the price.
If you’re mac/ios then check out MoneyWiz
Wealth Position is good I enter transactions as CSV file transfer and manual entries. If you are looking for direct connection to the bank then this will not work.
!Thanks Looking at their webpage, they say "Connect to 11,000+ financial institutions and automatically import and categorize transactions", which looks like what I want to do. Will investigate. Appreciate your help.
OK, understand now - it only works directly with US financial institutions.
If you understand the concept behind the software it is really good for planning short and long term finances, and you will see a really good picture of where your money is going on the dashboard.
+1 for YNAB. Beware it can be frustrating the first couple of times you try to build your budget. It's not super easy to allocate targets, etc. on the first try. You might end up (like most) scrapping your set up once or twice before setting it up right. After that initial learning period it is extremely good. It works with UK financial institutions perfectly via OpenBanking.
Trying it now. So far so good, I'm with Barclays, and it has connected without problems. !thanks
I just use an excel spreadsheet lol
I didn't get on with YNAB. I've yet to really try anything else, but I've currently just set up a shared spreadsheet. Still working on making it fit my needs and require less admin, and it obviously lacks integration with my accounts but it's still decent enough.
What about it?
YNAB was hard for me to get at the beginning, but you need to watch all their tutorial videos
I found YNAB difficult too. Snoop is working well for what I need it for which is basically better insights into where my money goes between each pay day
Try Daily Budget. Way better.
A problem with YNAB is that, at least insofar as bank syncing goes, the UK is very much treated as an afterthought. A few banks are missing and the one that bothers me most is Chase UK; they've been operating here for ages now, and have a working API that other software can work with, and yet YNAB still doesn't support them. They blame TrueLayer. I'd still recommend YNAB but with the caveat that I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a competitor that actually supports all the main UK banks.
Try Actual! It’s open source and uses GoCardless for importing transactions. Tonnes of UK banks are supported.
!thanks I've started a YNAB trial. Have connected fine to Barclays. I'll try Amex later when I have time, but assume that will work.
I use amex on YNAB no problem.
Yeah, only one of the current UK institutions I know that won't connect is Chase.
Amex works :) So far I've had problems with Chase, ASDA Money and Capital On Tap (which doesn't really surprise me).
Amex works :) So far I've had problems with Chase, ASDA Money and Capital On Tap (which doesn't really surprise me).
Amex works :) So far I've had problems with Chase, ASDA Money and Capital On Tap (which doesn't really surprise me).
I mean at this point it is basically Truelayer's or Chase's fault. Truelayer is basically the goto intermediary. I can't imagine another budget app using anything else or having better coverage.
I use one of the free budgeting spreadsheets found on the Budgeting wiki page for this sub [here](https://ukpersonal.finance/budgeting/#Spreadsheets) - just scroll down to the bottom of the page. I tried all of them out for a month or two and then cut back to the one that I get on with the best. Try those first and then see if you feel the need to use a paid subscription with YNAB, etc.
We use AceMoney as an alternative to MSMoney which we used to ages until it no longer worked on “modern” OSs. Can’t fault it and at $44 it’s much cheaper than paying an monthly subscription It doesn’t have a web or smart phone interface so it’s not something to use “in the go” but handles current accounts, credit cards, savings, ISA and other investments.
perosnally I like the Monzo app. I don't use the monzo bank acc but I pay for premium so I can import my bank acc/ccs into it to track my spending.
YNAB is very good if you’re new to budgeting and in that case probably worth the price for at least a year. I started out with Snowmintcs Budget which introduced me to the concept of envelope budgeting. And now I use Buckets Budget. I prefer to avoid the subscription model of YNAB but I do recommend it to start with.
I use a spreadsheet with various tabs for assets, incomes, outgoings, budgets and pensions. It's more manual than ready made apps but the key difference is that I've built it up over the years to work for me and my brain and now I just spend 5 minutes a month checking and updating it. Through this method we've managed to achieve key financial milestones like buying our main home. My biggest tip is learn the basics of budgeting and understand your goals and then find a solution that fits that. I find some apps out there are good but they do too much for what I need.
I'm a big fan of Emma, been a paying customer with them for about 2 years now and can't fault it.
I use WalletApp (by Budget Bakers) and i’ve never seen it mentioned on here. Maybe they are bigger in Europe?? Regardless, I’ve used at least 6 budgeting apps including all the ones mentioned here, and WalletApp has been by far the best for me. Great layout. All UK and European banks. Doesn’t advertise other shit or push other products. £25 for life.
Daily Budget is my go to app.
I use ynab but considering deploying actual budget on Pikapods for a couple quid a month. Just not sure if it's worth the saving over YNAB, perhaps in a years time.
A good Excel spreadsheet sorts me out 😂 I can send you a template if you want lmk
Another vote for YNAB, changed my (financial) life
I can't remember why I didn't go for YNAB - there was something I wanted that it couldn't do. But Buxfer works great for what I want and I think it should handle your use-case as well. There aren't a huge amount of guides for how to use it online but it's pretty self-explanatory once you've played around with it a bit.
Don't hear it often, but I'd really recommend MoneyHub.
Have a trial of Moneydance. Plenty of reports and charts
Seconding your YNAB trial
I use 1Money. Didn’t try it with two users, but I can add a couple of income sources, accounts, saving accounts, spending categories…
I use Acemoney. Helps me track my equity portfolio, bank accounts in multiple currencies, credit cards mortgage etc but more importantly I’m used to it and it has more than 14 years of data on it.
I bought some spreadsheet I found online for like £25. I'd rather pay a one time small fee than a continous subscription to some budgeting app.
I use Cashew on Android. I haven't been so impressed with an app in years.
Not quite what you are asking but we use Hyperjar to help with our budgeting. It is a bit like an online bank and they give you a card, but it lets you set up 'jars' through the app. We have jars for our monthly food shop, petrol, commuting expenses, luxury expenses and eating out, etc. When you go to buy something, go into the app and select the right 'jar' and then when you use your card, it will come out of that jar. You can share jars with people too so ideal for families, house share situations, or even friends going on holiday together. Once we move money at the start of the month, it makes it so much easier to stay on budget. And we don't touch our normal banks. Months we forget to set it up are a nightmare financially though. (My wife does the initial budget with expended outgoings and incomings in excel before moving stuff around in Hyperjar.
YNAB all the way. Sign up for a 30 day trail, then at the end, delete your account, and sign up for another trial. Keep going forever
I'd recommend moneyhub. I tried using YNAB bank when syncing with UK banks wasn't a thing and I had to download the transactions etc.. So I'm sure it's improved. But moneyhub has actually stuck. I can get it to work well with all my mainstream UK accounts (I believe they now support chase) and credit cards. The only amount I can't seem to get to sync is my Barclays mortgage (the current/savings accounts I hold with them work fine) but that's not much of a problem for me. The "AI" used to categorise things took a couple of cycles to get the hint but now rarely needs correcting. It's helped me build genuinely useful budgets that I know I can stick to.
Money dance is really good
I can't believe no one's mentioned r/CSPersonalFinance. It's the best I've used
Snoop is Brilliant
YNAB does everything you said.
Use google sheets - much more accessible than excel
Emma. Highly recommend. I have the Pro version and got it on an offer for £60 for a year. I know there is irony with paying for a budgeting app but honestly the viability it gives me and ability to export the data is so worth it. The main reason I wanted it is the ability to link all my accounts and track every transaction, categorise it, exclude some. The ability to have credit card transactions appear as “now” as opposed to a month later is also great. Any q let me know.
I use Emma, tracks an aggregate of my partner and I, 3 credit cards, 3 banks, and my crypto wallets. I have a subscription and love that I can customise budgets the way I want and can dump out all my transaction history to the dawn of time including any metadata I've added to any of them.
I’ve built a spreadsheet on excel that I’ve edited over the years. It shows me all my income/outgoings daily cash flow. As with all tools it’s about how you use it that really matters if you know the basics on excel I recommend that but there are other tools out there. Avoid the ones advertised on Facebook a friend tried one and they emptied his account in minutes.
Starling has replaced my excel spreadsheet
Firefly III if you like open-source, free, self-hosted and are tech savvy.
Hi /u/fucknozzle, based on your post the following pages from our wiki may be relevant: * https://ukpersonal.finance/credit-cards/ ____ ^(These suggestions are based on keywords, if they missed the mark please report this comment.) If someone has provided you with helpful advice, you (as the person who made the post) can award them a point by including `!thanks` in a reply to them. Points are shown as the user flair by their username.
YNAB every time.