Do you track your finances / budget?
If so, do you use an app for it or prefer manually in Excel?
If the former: which app? What do you like about it and what can't you stand?
If manual: What insights are you trying to gather? How have you duct-taped your own solution?
I use excel (Google sheet) and mint. Mint is good but I have too many bank account and some bank don't sync properly so sometimes what I want to see is unreadable and difficult to sort.
I would love to have an app that syncs but let you do history and comparation between month. Google sheet let me compare month by month year by year per account or category.
The apps are too complicated to make the same view.
Hey diealvarado - thanks for sharing! What insights are you looking to gather by comparing month by month or year by year? Any custom comparison logic you have in your google sheets right now?
Oh man I track stuff DILIGENTLY!
I'm currently using an app called Money Lover yet I also manually copy over data into Excel every ~6ish months (this is for a. backup purposes, and b. accounts reconciliation).
I don't really recommend Money Lover due to a number of reasons:
Now I understand that a lot of these issues would be solved if I sync my bank account to the app directly but, unfortunately, banks in my country don't offer that luxury 😢.
Now the good stuff:
Literally the only reason I use this app is because the 1st time I searched in the Play Store this app was #1 so I picked it but I'm ACTIVELY searching for alternatives (that's another reason I keep an up-to-date Excel sheet so I can import the history).
In terms of insights, it helps to be able to realize what my expenses are as it helps to budget if you look at the data. For example, I once realized that I was spending a lot of money on eating out even though individually the events were pocket change yet added up, it was a large chunk of my expenses. Insights like that are helpful for sure.
Hope this helps you.
Incredibly helpful, xmok. Which country are you from - out of curiosity? :)
Interesting... Can you do that in the app UI? Or what's where the Excel reconciliation comes into play? Are most of these debts/loans on a personal basis or does it also apply to home loans or something like that?
Besides the portability, do you have any equations / custom logic within this excel to analyze the reports?
Debts and Loans
Running Budgets
This is difficult to explain because until you use the app for a while, you won't really be able to understand the nuances. On the face of it, budgeting is fine but it's the little things like:
and so on. Like I said, it's Quality of Life stuff one notices over a long period of usage.
Custom Logic
Oh for sure! The finances Excel Sheets (plural) are part of a Master Excel Workbook I use to track plenty of items in my life so the information is synced with other items like vehicle expenses, education, master budgets, etc. For reporting, Money Lover is very good and that's definitely one major plus point.
You can try Microsoft money. Microsoft gave for free its last version when they stopped this product. They called it Microsoft sunset edition. It has everything, bank accounts, credit cards, investing, reports, categories, forecasts. Suitable for both personal finances and for small business finances.
Only problem: It runs only on Windows.