I’m looking for something that will give me daily / weekly notifications of how much I’ve spent. Might end up building it but was curious if there’s anything off the shelf like that.
I've also heard good things about CoPilot (https://copilot.money/) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.
That said, I found a middle ground about six months ago. The spreadsheet tracks the budget, brokerage contributions, statistics, and savings (think monthly money being set aside for yearly payments and such), and then I use Monarch Money for tracking transactions.
Manually tracking my transactions in the spreadsheet was just so tedious and having Monarch handle that via Plaid and the three-ish other services that fill the same space has been nice.
One issue I have that isn't the fault of any app or service is that there are still plenty of banks that don't support OAuth for reading data. The big ones I use all support it no problem, but my primary, smaller (not tiny) bank and even Discover want you to use your _same_ username and password along with a checkbox in the settings to "allow third party access". They don't tell you what is limited via that third party access either, so I can't tell if it allows read-only when there's no MFA involved or what. In those cases, I still manually input transactions, but it's the vast minority of my transactions.
Monarch will give you notifications for transactions, overages on budgets, etc, but I bet any half decent service will do the same at this point.
What I want is an app that can do OCR recognition of the bill or invoice and categorize the individual items and not just the whole invoice into a broad category. Sadly this tech does not exists.
Sometimes, you're in the moment trying to make a decision about whether or how much to spend. Call that use 1. And sometimes you're looking back at your spending history needing to make some sense of what has already happened. Call that use 2.
For use 1, I have started using Paktol[0], a weirdly-named phone app made by the guys who created ClojureDart[1] (and written in that Clojure dialect). It's extremely simple, and that's the point. You set a target amount of discretionary spending each day, and it tells you how much you have left or whether you're "overdrawn" for the day. That's it. There's no categories, no analytics, nothing like that. You just plug in every expense that's discretionary and it tells you if you're on track. It's so simple it almost annoys me that it's paid. But it's working and no other money tracking app I've ever tried has. It has already paid for itself in better decision-making on my part for having it, so I actually can't complain.
For the second function, I'm just using Excel. I have my own cobbled-together categorization system that's working well enough, and aside from having to go download transactions manually from my different accounts because they don't have an API, the bulk of the categorization work for new entries is automatic (Power Query is very cool).
Part of me wonders what an all-in-one solution could look like and I daydream for ten minutes about making one myself. But that never lasts more than a minute or two. There's a reason so many have tried and failed. I'm not smarter than any of the hundreds of people who have already tried and only partly succeeded.
The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.
(When I was a graduate student with $20k income, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to save money. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realized that I should use that time thinking about how to earn more money instead. These days, I earn more than 10x that number, and the only rule I try to abide by is do not buy things I don't need, as I already have a good spending habit. I never felt as financially constraint as when I living on ~$2000/month.)
Why?
One, I pay cash as much as I possibly can (fuck surveillance finance), so using something that brings in my transactions isn't that much of a time savings. I have a minimal number of monthly scheduled transactions, so bringing those in manually just isn't really that painful.
Two, it adds a tiny bit of friction to my spending. This is a good thing (at least for me). If I know I have to write down the amount, and if only briefly think about what I've already spent this month, it slightly dissuades me from conducting the transaction.
Again, this works for me. Sharing in case it works for you.
Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.
SimpleFIN is fast and a quick Plaid alternative for just $1.50 a month or $15 for the year. I created my SimpleFIN account, copied the API token, and added a bank account. Then I jumped back to Actual Budget, entered the API token, and linked the account from Actual to SimpleFIN. You can link as many bank, credit card accounts as you want with one SimpleFIN account.
The key issue in this world is that everyone wants a slightly different set of features, so any one-size-fits-all app will be too complex. DIY-ing it means you get exactly the features you want and no gratuitous complexity.
The big down side is that it is fairly expensive, I spend almost $200/year on it. Which would be fine, if I felt like I was getting something for it. But, in the 2 years I've had it, I've not really felt like they've done much improvement of it, and my customer support experience has been pretty bad. For example, one time some of my "auto transfers" just vanished, leading to a couple hundred dollars in late fees, and when I contacted support they "recovered" them, but then I ended up with a bunch of duplicated auto transfers.
I also really just don't ever feel like I have much of an idea of how much money I have available. Simple was always very good about that: I could look and it would tell me an exact number I had that was unused.
Now, that $200/year is for a family plan, so it covers 4 people. Having debit cards and accounts for the kids is fairly nice. Transferring money to the kids for chores is handy.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazon-order-histor...
I got it when I had kids and my energy and time was redirected.
My prior system was boring: plain text transactions updated daily, and collated using ledger. (Ledger-cli.org)
The reporting and budgeting is top notch, and the lack of an integration means you're on top of every penny since you have to type it out. Honestly even with a full house it was only 2 or 5 transactions a day. Easy.
Now I’m just using a banking app (https://moneymoney-app.com/) that fetched the status of all accounts and shows them in one place including my portfolios etc.
I know manual expense tracking might sound like a bear, but I find it cathartic and reflective to have to enter expenses.
It's end-to-end encrypted, open source, and you can self-host it.
When you open it, you can see with a simple green/red bar with how much you've spent and how much you have left for the month (for the whole month and per budget), in case that helps.
In the end, i ended up creating a simple react app. All the data is stored in a single json file that I sync. I load web app/app and just upload this json file.
Uses react-spreadsheet so all fields are editable.
Wrote a basic parser for this and using it I get the records in JSON which I use to show simple progress bars and dashboard.
Instead of tracking your expenses, create a budget in an Excel sheet, put aside the money for your regular expenses immediately after you get your salary, then invest the rest (create an investment plan) or transfer to a savings account.
I use spreadsheets - download csv from your bank, import, label categories, then you can look at it any way you like. Doesn't take that much time, and with a few heuristics, the tagging can be mostly automated...
For example, my car insurance is billed every 6 months, so every 6 mo, I exceed my budget for car stuff. copilot does a better job for accounting for these.
Edit: no notifications. Sorry I forgot that was one of your criteria.
1. Use a debit card or cash for purchases when practical.
2. Pay bills when they arrive, not when they are due. You are not earning money from the float anyway.
3. Supplement with other documentation ad hoc.
4. Improve the system over time based on what works for you.
It’s feature-rich, connects to most financial accounts and feels like a modern piece of software. It’s much improved from its Windows counterpart.
I run my entire financial life from it.
The initial setup seems the most inundating, and is why I haven't started using it.
I asked my highfalutin wealth advisors if they could set this up or knew someone who could. They said to just use a spreadsheet. (Not the answer I was looking for.)
I've settled for using Projection Lab to keep of my net worth and have monthly targets to hit. There's still work to do. But it's much easier since I only care about the totals.
