Some of them integrate with your bank account, credit card and I'm not really interested in this sort of stuff. I don't want 3rd party apps having access to whatever my bank produces, not to mention that are hundreds of banks out there and I'd assume that making those integrations are in fact a big deal and possibly dangerous (for a security point of view).
In my specific case, it all started with a local spreadsheet on my laptop, that later became a google forms (I wanted to save new transactions "on the go" and also share it with my wife) and now I'm going to build yet another budgeting app for my needs. Nothing fancy, but just something helpful and makes me proud of.
If you are using a budgeting app already, what's missing?
If you wish to use one, what sort of features would you look for?
* Let me create a payee like "Amazon" and define some rules to map transactions to them. Make sure there's some flexibility. Regex would be nice but probably doesn't have to be that powerful. Things like "AMZN MKTP%" and "AMAZON.COM%".
* Make sure that for all functions in your UI/API/whatever that the transactions are as if they were all to the single payee "Amazon."
* But, and this is the thing that other budget software gets wrong, keep the original transaction around so that when I reimport my transactions they get mapped correctly.
Support payment apps like Venmo/CashApp without having to treat them like this weird account. I get that's how accountants do it but I just want to import my Venmo and link the transactions.
* If I split something with someone then only count the money I spent toward my budget category. Other apps add this as a "credit" to the category which, while works, is silly and gives a distorted picture of my spending. I buy $60 worth of food for friends but I only spend $10 then I want the $50 be its own thing and moved out of the category once linked. I should be able to do this with cash too. Give me the option to hide such transactions since they're not really mine and just noise to my spending.
* Similarly, let me choose how I want joint spending to work. If me and my husband have a joint checking account in addition to our personal accounts and I set a global rule like "keep under $200 for groceries" then allow me to decide whether I want $200 spent from the joint account to count as $200 or $100 (or really any split I suppose).
Make income work less silly than imaginary infinity dollar accounts. Behind the scenes do what you gotta do but make it okay to have money appear from nowhere. I don't want my stimulus check to live in an imaginary "The Fed." Accountants I guess love it but it's just noise to me.
Another one for managing multiple accounts and marriage/roommates. Allow creating account-local, person-local, and global rules and buckets for everything.
On the other side, sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile our food budget between months. If we have a big grocery trip on the last day of the month, we kind of expect to spend less the next month but won't always remember that when we go reconcile our budget.
The main features I found missing in other budgeting apps that prompted me to make my own were:
- native multicurrency support (I travel a lot and am a digital nomad by lifestyle, so this was quite important to me)
- curtains pulled on the "magic" that some budgeting apps try to add to my transactions
- the ability to split/group transactions so I can see how much I actually spent when I pick up a large bill and friends pay me back
- separate tracking of recurring expenses
- seeing historical spending trends and having information help drive my budget for the next month
I've implemented all of this and more. If you're interested, check it out at https://lunchmoney.app. I'd love to hear what you think.
In terms of what's missing that's not currently on the roadmap:
- rollover budgets
- a savings and/or goals feature
- debt repayment feature
As made evident by this thread, everyone has their own preferred way to budget, and of course there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Looking forward to seeing what you build, if you end up going down that path. Cheers!
Categorizing bank charges is accounting. Spending money then categorizing expenses is a terrible way to budget in my experience. It’s backwards.
I separate my income into different accounts, then spend from those accounts.
This has many advantages:
- Not possible to overspend.
- Extra money rolls over.
- No time wasted accounting, labeling, reconciling, etc.
- No need to share transaction history or credentials with budgeting apps.
Privacy.com let’s you create virtual credit cards with spending limits. That’s the closest thing to my ideal budgeting app, but the limitation is I can’t withdraw cash.
The app I want is a bank that can easily create multiple accounts and associated debit cards.
Before online shopping this was simple, I just had to take out the cash I needed for the different categories and keep them separate.
Month-to-month doesn't work.
Mint's budget breakdown totally fails if my Landlord cashes my check too early/late.
Month-to-month doesn't work for expenses that aren't monthly. Example: travel.
Month-to-month doesn't work when the calendar lines up and you get 3 paychecks that month instead of the normal 2.
I'd be curious for a budgeting app that still has the concept of a month, but isn't locked to calendar dates.
Rolling average? Bucketed allotments that roll over? Maybe
Multi-currency support requires setting up multiple budgets and switching between them. For a while I needed to track both USD and ARS, but the ARS was for a much smaller amount and limited scope. It was annoying having to switch between the budgets when I was traveling in Argentina, but still had to manage things in the US.
Multi-month view. YNAB4 had it, it was great, YNAB5 dropped it. This let me easily see trends over recent months for the same category, and could budget ahead more easily as I started getting ahead on my money (I liked budgeting ahead more than setting up an emergency fund category, made it clear how far ahead I was, and in the worst case I'd take money from 1-3 months out to use for present day emergencies).
Choice between rolling over funds or releasing them at the end of a time period. If I budget $200 for groceries and only use $150, in YNAB it automatically makes that $50 extra available the next month. I want that. But that's not always the case, I'd like the option of releasing the funds at the end of the budget period. Let's say I budget $500 for a trip, and only spend $400, that extra $100 would be better served (for me) freed up and applied to another category, as my travel (especially these days) is infrequent.
Alternate time periods. jdtbuchanan also mentioned this. I budget $100/month for eating lunch at work, spread over 20 work days (most months) means $5/day. But if my team and I go out for an expensive lunch, I'll hit the limit much earlier. So the spending is within my budget, but not the intent of my budget. I'd like to be able to see daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-annual/annual budget options (at least the periods below a month, budgeting for quarterly expenses with a monthly budget works, but budgeting for daily/weekly expenses doesn't work as well).
- Import bank files (ofx / qfx)
- Let me flag some transactions as 'do not import'
- Ability to categorize transactions, and have it auto-categorize transactions as they're imported. This should be done by name and amount. Eg - $80 from Chevron might be Auto Fuel, but $5 from Chevron might be Snack Food.
- Ability to split transactions
- Ability to manually enter transactions. Because sometimes I pay cash
- Ability to have sub-categories. Eg: Car; Car : Fuel; Car : Maintenance; Car : Repairs; Car : Insurance;
- Ability to view spending by category by month / by year. This can either be by sub-categories, or roll sub-categories into a parent category. Be able to drill-down to get more details.
- Open source, self hostable with a paid hostable subscription option that syncs to different devices. Unfortunately one time payments don't really cut it for sustained development.
- Native performing clients for web, mobile, and desktop (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux are all supported by Flutter, but the app will not necessarily have native UI though). This can be done through Flutter which compiles ahead of time without running on a JS VM like Electron or React Native. Hopefully you should get good performance.
- On the feature side of things, rolling daily/weekly/monthly budgets, with the envelope system where you allocate a budget per day/week/month and try not to go over it. If you do, you'll have to pull from another budget. Also gonna have a way to budget for some event in the future, and split up that amount into timeperiod based increments. For example, if you estimate you want to take a 6k vacation in a year, the app would help you budget 500 a month.
- Undecided on whether it should be manual transaction entry only or whether it should integrate with banks, Venmo, and the like. Some people like one, and not the other.
- Analysis over timescales and categories. Especially annoying in Mint to mark a merchant like "AMZN" into "Amazon" and not have it propagate across all findings of the word "AMZN".
- Similar to analysis, have forecasting as to what I might spend in the future. This can be from recurring transactions, pattern recognition and the like.
- Have good splits. Other apps don't let you split money easily, if from Venmo or whatnot. If I split dinner with a friend, I don't want to see that I've spent all of it in my food budget, only that I actually spent half and my friend recompensated me.
What else would you want?
For example, if my bill is $10/month +- $5 (std), then it will alert me if it exceeds $6.49 more than the $10/month (the 80% confidence interval.) This is useful for phone bills which can go up by a certain amount (e.g. long distance) but don't have a fixed threshold. If they're over by a few dollars for a few months then I've probably added an add-on, but there's no "fixed" amount that it should be, just that it's not too much more than it was.
If you’re looking at DIY budgeters who don’t want third-party access, I’d make sure that subviews of specific goals, like a pay down chart of student loans or month-over-month of credit card bills. Since you’re manually entering information, your primary sell is probably going to be UI-based.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwCamSEqPXiv0jwSobJl...
It isn't a "batteries included" solution, but with a little creativity it allows you to do pretty much anything you want.
If you are prepared to even build your own app, I thing it might interest you.
Some things that I wish it had or did differently are:
- The progress bars should show the money that is scheduled to be used for a given bucket (probably in a different colour or something)
- It'd be nice to show a $/day remaining for a bucket, again taking into account the scheduled transactions too
- In the upcoming transactions, it should show all the upcoming repeats for a given transaction within the current budget period.. E.g. if I have something that is $100/week, the scheduled transactions only shows 1x $100 transaction. You can replicate what I want by creating 4 different transactions that repeat every 4 weeks, but thats silly :D
- I'd like a way to enter a transaction as a 'draft' very quickly via a home screen widget or even Siri or something. And then I could go in and edit it later to set the bucket it comes from etc.
- It has no good way to do long term savings - you can create a goal bucket for it but the bars etc for it become kind of meaningless.
* Open source.
* No telemetry sent.
* One-time fee, no 'subscription'.
* Linux-compatible.