Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

[dyeje]

I’m trying to figure out a budgeting system that works for me. I’ve tried a few that use Plaid integrations but they haven’t been effective for me.

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.

[anthropodie]

I am using actual budget (which is free and open source) for this exact use case. It won't notify you but it has dashboard that can show you how you are spending

https://www.actualbudget.com/

[blakeburch]

I highly recommend LunchMoney (https://lunchmoney.app/). It's built by a solo developer who is very responsive and continues to make the app great. Lots of automation and ability to create custom classification rules. I've been happy for the past 3 years.

I've also heard good things about CoPilot (https://copilot.money/) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.

[jnfr]

Thanks for the mention and for your continuous support! Jen here, founder of Lunch Money :) We've come a long way since the solo dev days– happy to announce we're a core team of 5 now (yes, still bootstrapped!) and have lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline for 2025!

[merky]

+1 for LunchMoney. Happy paying customer. I remember trying it when it first launched and it wasn't for me at the time. Now, with kids and a home, and lots of money being spent on various things across multiple accounts, it's very useful to just get labels on all the transactions in one place.

LunchMoney is great for retrospective analysis. For long-term financial projections, I really like https://app.projectionlab.com . Great pairing.

[jscohn85]

+1 for https://lunchmoney.app/

I found them after Mint was discontinued and CreditKarma made it impossible for me to set up my account, while I looked into other options which have even been mentioned in this thread.

LunchMoney's multi-currency support and easy API (https://lunchmoney.dev/) were killer features for me, however, since they allowed me to develop a personal solution to also keep track of my non-USA accounts.

[me_smith]

LunchMoney is cool. When Mint shut down I tried several apps (LunchMoney, Copilot, and Monarch). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get LunchMoney to work with one of my credit unions. I reached out to them but they couldn’t really do anything about it. I wanted to support the solo dev but I ultimately chose Monarch because it just worked with all my accounts out of the box.

[alp1n3_eth]

+1 for Copilot.

When Mint shut down I did a ton of trials and Copilot had the best UI for me and I didn't have to learn a new "system" like YNAB. It relies on Plaid, so just make sure your banks/cards/accounts are mainstream (Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman, Vanguard, etc).

[linsomniac]

I loved the idea of Lunch Money, but I bought it for a year and really never got anything out of it. This was probably 4 years ago so maybe it's changed now.

I think my biggest lack there was that I really needed to see INTO my spending to get value, in particular Amazon is a large blob that I really needed more information on: I get groceries, home repair, toys, tools, work, clothing, health, entertainment. Without seeing into that, all the action I took on Lunch Money really only gave me information on my non-discretionary spending.

[rbaudibert]

+1 to LunchMoney, it's amazing, I'm a very happy user

[alienreborn]

Used lunchmoney for years before moving to CoPilot couple of years ago. Can vouch for both of them to being great. I just moved to CoPilot because they got macos and ios apps unlike lunchmoney (web only back when I used it)

[satvikpendem]

Only issue is no mobile app. I track transactions on mobile so this is a must for me. Mint really was good, wasn't it?

[theappsecguy]

Lunchmoney is great and much more affordable that YNAB

[rocketpastsix]

YNAB generally gets mentioned as one of the de factor budgeting options. I used it a lot a few years ago and it works. Their system is a little wonky if you aren't used to the envelope method but they have great docs, a great little podcast and a healthy community.

[fanieldanara]

Ditto on YNAB! I started using YNAB a couple years ago now and it has fundamentally changed my perspective and relationship with money. The 4 rules of YNAB [1] really helped me conceptualize how to best take advantage of it.

[1] https://www.ynab.com/blog/ynab-four-rules-less-stress

[Semaphor]

Love YNAB, been using it since 2011 and never switched to their subscription cloud service. YNAB Classic still works, though I don’t think you can legally acquire it anymore.

[jppope]

I wasn't a fan. tried it for a couple of months and I kept felt like it didn't have features I was looking for. Currently using Monarch which is pretty good, not perfect. I wish I could have done my own thing with plaid but sadly I couldn't get a dev or small business account.

[weakfish]

Ditto. I can’t imagine living without it.

[jjice]

I've been so picky over the years and tried so many different services, but I always ended up back in a spreadsheets. Infinite configurability, but more manual.

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.

[redditor98654]

At this point I have tried them all and don’t like any of them. What I really want to know is more granular data on where I am spending my money on. These apps will tell me I spent $6000 last year at Costco but it cannot tell me if some that was on spur of the moment items like a new pair of bedsheets that I probably didn’t need or actual groceries.

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.

[spydum]

the funny thing is almost every major retailer with a loyalty program does this behind the scenes.. but they do NOT offer it as a data feed or API to customers. If they did, it would be awesome, but I think its mostly downsides for them.

[HPsquared]

Ideally something that scans the invoice and associates it with a bank transaction record.

[cfiggers]

Here's my opinion: there's actually two very different use cases here. Most apps I've tried do not distinguish between the two and that, for me, is their downfall.

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.

[0] https://paktol.t10s.com/

[1] https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

[laurent_du]

"Pactole" means "heap of money" in French slang. As in a heap of money you keep under your matrass, or a large sum you win suddenly. Hence Paktol.

[brainfog]

I've tried a variety of tools over the years and always end up going back to a low tech approach: spreadsheets. I set up my credit cards to email me after every transaction, which I then manually copy over to my spreadsheet with additional category information. Pivot tables give me a breakdown by category / month.

The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.

[sixhobbits]

yeah big +1 to this. People are obsessed with automation, but doing a bit of manual work for stuff like budgeting and project management actually really helps cement it mentally I think (a bit like hand writing lecture notes, etc).

Spreadsheet + Pivot table is all you need in many cases.

[anticorporate]

I've settled on good old fashioned spreadsheets.

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.

[johntash]

I think I have the opposite mindset. I prefer putting everything on credit cards because then I don't have to keep a receipt or remember exactly what I spent where if I go to multiple places in one day. Plus bills/online subscriptions/etc that aren't cash-friendly.

I'd like something like Privacy that creates temporary credit card numbers, but is also anonymous from the provider side. Sort of like buying a new visa gift card to use every month.

But I also like getting points to use while traveling

[jimbob45]

You could combine this with a quick cronjob to send notifications about daily/weekly spending but I don’t know an easy way to send texts without dipping into Twilio, which is difficult. If you’re okay having emails notify you, that might work.

Maybe enter purchases in a linked spreadsheet from your phone to your desktop to track purchases? Might just be better off sucking up purchase information from your bank’s API to your spreadsheet. Smaller bank APIs tend to suck though.

[n144q]

YNAB was often recommended, although I cannot personally understand "budgeting" as a concept and how YNAB helps you achieve your financial goal.

(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.)

[holletron]

I'm in the same boat, but have decided one day to take a closer look at my spending and trends over time, but it appears all the apps are budget-first. YNAB is one of the better ones though, you can install a browser extension for better reports and completely ignore the budgeting parts and use it mostly for the bank sync part, and it works. For US banks I suppose it will work like a charm. I'm in the EU and due to specificity of my bank there were issues, so ultimately I ended up with a custom solution processing .csv files exported from the bank.

[fiftyacorn]

Where you have enough money an expenses tracker is more useful than budgeting applications

[djhworld]

https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.

[wbadart]

+1

While I don't think this approach meets OP's requirements (they seem to be looking for something a little more turn-key), I hope other readers of this thread will fall down this rabbit hole.

I'm now in my 5th year of tracking every penny in and out of my life with hledger[0], with a mostly manual approach. Some benefits:

- as noted by a spreadsheet user, it adds friction to spending money, which has curbed frivolous/ unplanned expenses for me (and double entry accounting makes it impossible for money to "disappear")

- if you subscribe to Files over Apps[1] hledger and its ilk (beancounter, gnu cash) are hands down your most mature, stable options

- I've learned a great deal about accounting and how money works in general

- the reports I can generate from my ledger give me a decent starting point at tax time

Happy accounting!

[0]: https://hledger.org/index.html

[1]: https://stephango.com/file-over-app

[laserson]

I'm a big fan of Tiller [1], which is a paid service that basically just connects Yodlee to Google Docs or Excel. It will dump all your transactions and balance info into a spreadsheet and you can do what you want with it. It also has lots of templates for things like budgeting etc. I run a daily cron job that loads the transaction data and produces a nice Jupyter-based report. It will require some custom building, but the API plumbing is done for you.

[1]: https://www.tillerhq.com/

[LeicaLatte]

I'm a spreadsheet pro, but I set up this budget stack — Actual Budget + SimpleFIN — for my spouse last week.

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.

[Mattwmaster58]

> You can link as many bank, credit card accounts as you want with one SimpleFIN account.

The website says "Connect up to 25 institutions and 25 apps"

[johntash]

I know you haven't been using it for long, but are you (or your wife) liking this setup? I don't like having to pay for SimpleFIN, but I'm thinking about doing it too.

[dotancohen]

Are you affiliated with them? Or just been trained (as a human) on marketing materials ))

[yqiang]

I've tried a bunch, and while I'm reluctant to recommend a Quicken product, Quicken Simplifi is actually working out really well for my family and I. The UI is similar to Mint & it supports Apple Pay. I used to export all my data from Mint to a CSV for further cleanup/analysis, but the built-in tools in Simplifi are good enough now that I just do everything inside the app.

[johntash]

Is Simplifi basically just the new version of Mint? I hadn't seen it before you mentioned it

[sergiomattei]

Quicken for Mac is also very nice as a native app and one time purchase.

[d_burfoot]

If you decide to go the low-tech/DIY route, I will shamelessly self-promote my platform WebWidgets.io. It basically allows you to upload SQLite file(s) and then talk to them in JavaScript from a web app. I built a finance tracker app for myself using WWIO (I do a monthly download of my spending data from my online bank and then upload the CSV to my app). I've been using it for years.

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.

[linsomniac]

I've been using Qube https://qubemoney.com/ for a couple years as a bank to help with my money management. It has some nice features, but I'm looking to migrate away from it over the next year. I'm a "Simple" refugee, who got here via "One".

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.

[linsomniac]

For tracking Amazon spending, "Amazon Order History" is a Chrome extension that will walk through your Amazon orders and give you a spreadsheet of specific items in your orders. It's kind of kludgy, but does seem to work well.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazon-order-histor...

[yaksha]

I used to use Mint, and now use Monarch since Mint shutdown. I'm pretty content with it as a tool to aggregate various accounts into a single place for review.

[jppope]

this is what I'm using as well and I agree with the sentiment

[xnx]

Exactly my path as well. Disappointed in the built in reporting tools, but glad it has csv export.

[AdrianB1]

I gave up and went to Excel. I track the utilities separately, for everything else I import the monthly reports from the banks and do the analysis every quarter. Initially I was spending more time with this, but I am disciplined enough that I am just checking that I am in line with my expectations, no need for alerts. For some grocery account I don't check the balance for an entire quarter, I am always inside the limit.

[jvanderbot]

Monarch is fine for me. But it probably fits under "plaid integration".

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.

[dewey]

These tools always felt like a chore to me that didn’t really provide any value to me. Felt the same as “productivity” tools that people pay for to feel like they are doing something.

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.

[anon7000]

At this point, the tools are so good that it’s close to zero effort on my part, and solves so many financial planning problems:

One is, how much money do I actually have to spend right now? Account balances don’t mean anything here. You don’t have that full $3k balance to spend if rent is due tomorrow! And what if I need to pay an insurance bill in 6mo that costs thousands? My account balance doesn’t know that, but a budget item can save for it periodically. So I can rest assured that the “available money” shown in the budget is real, I can spend it (or save it) on anything, and every known expense or bill is still accounted for. Not to mention, it automatically makes sure every credit card transaction results in money set aside for the credit card bill.

It’s hard to quantify the stress you avoid by knowing for sure that you still have the money for big recurring expenses after spending a bunch on something fun. This was more impactful when I was making less money, but it’s so nice to make sure the handful of big yearly bills are already taken care of, and I won’t have to come up with $5k more than normal when that happens.

Also, it’s extremely worthwhile to analyze your spending habits. It’s a chance to understand the true cost of owning your car, or if you spend more on dining out or groceries. That gives you power to make changes. You can easily realize what habits have an outsized impact and what are probably harmless. If you want to have money to buy a house, maybe you need to cut back on an expense. Well, saving $20 on coffee each month won’t be much. But saving a few hundred by using rideshare less might help.

And you get all of that just for spending a few minutes each week double checking the budget categories on automatically imported transactions. The app does all the hard work!

[jpb0104]

I've been tracking my expenses meticulously and manually for over 10 years now with https://budgetmyway.com/. I've built this to scratch my own itch, and built an expense tracker that meets "my" needs. I have a handful of happy users. This is more of a passion project and not a solo-startup or anything like that. I'd love to hear your feedback and see if it meets your needs. There are not any external data connections via Plaid, no 3rd party data tracking or sharing, your data is your data.

I know manual expense tracking might sound like a bear, but I find it cathartic and reflective to have to enter expenses.

[BrunoBernardino]

If you don't need/want integrations but want privacy and full control of your data with simplicity and ease of adding expenses, I can recommend Budget Zen [1], which I have built and have been using myself for over four years, now.

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.

[1]: https://budgetzen.net

[nabaraz]

I have tried all - Mint and many others. They were either too complex or weren't privacy friendly to my likings.

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.

https://i.imgur.com/WUCAIGt.png

[bwb]

I highly recommend https://lunchmoney.app/, best ive ever used!

[teecha]

Is lunch money similar to mint and just shows you your spending? Or is it envelope or zero based like ynab ?

[zsoltkacsandi]

After more than a decade of trying to find a good one, the only thing I learned and I would share: if you’ve spent the money it’s already late tracking it.

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.

[bhu1st]

I am working on BEXT https://github.com/bhu1st/bext

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.

Parser: https://github.com/bhu1st/bext-php

[mattbillenstein]

Do not trust Plaid or services that use it - it stores your login credentials directly...

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...

[johntash]

Plaid/Yodlee/SimpleFIN etc are slowly getting better about not having to store credentials or do scraping. It depends more on the bank. A lot of banks don't support things like oauth, but a few do support giving 3rd party apps read-only access or at least have an oauth2 flow to approve access instead of giving them your user/password.

Agreed in general though, I don't like having to give a budgeting app potential access to transfer all of my money away (even if they promise they won't)

[intersteel2]

[plug] I've been working on cashtrac.me to do all the thinking for me. E.g. "here's a better way to order your earning/spending". Looking for people interested in participating in user studies or just folks interested in the problem. Its free for use ATM.

[itake]

I use copilot. its decent, b/c it helps me manage subscription purchases better than the other apps.

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.

[linsomniac]

Anyone using DAS Budget? 3-4 years ago it was all the rage, but I haven't really heard much buzz about it in the last few years. https://dasbudget.com/

[vaseline]

I found a good balance with Tiller (https://www.tillerhq.com/). It gets everything in one spreadsheet where I can query and get quick summaries with ease.

[lee-rhapsody]

My wife and I have a shared Google Sheet where we enter every purchase (logging date, location, cost, and category) we made that day. Then we reconcile it with our monthly budget that night and make spending decisions from there.

[jtbayly]

For Mac and iOS users, Moneywell is by far the simplest for using an envelope system. I love it. Local data. Solid syncing. Native app. Drag and drop money where you want it.

Edit: no notifications. Sorry I forgot that was one of your criteria.

[brudgers]

Monitor your bank account.

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.

[withinboredom]

I earn interest weekly. So I am earning money off the float.

[sergiomattei]

I’ve been using Quicken for Mac and I love it.

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.

[entrepy123]

GnuCash [0] has looked the best for this every time I looked.

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.)

[0] https://www.gnucash.org/

[cfiggers]

I gave GNU Cash a real honest try about a year ago and couldn't figure it out. I don't think I'm above-average intelligence, but I'm very software-savvy. And I simply could not do it. Like at some point I got angry and decided I was going to crack this code if it killed me to do so, and I literally failed.

GNU Cash may or may not be beyond the ken of mere mortals. But it's certainly beyond me.

[simplify]

Could be wrong, but I feel like the most tedious part is categorization of transactions. I wonder if any have adopted LLMs to make this better?

[mrngm]

YNAB4 or YNAB Classic, the standalone desktop application based on Adobe Air, was already quite capable of learning the categories for transaction, of course after you've provided them a few times. This still works good to this day, without LLMs; I'm regularly importing bank transactions, and usually I only have to confirm the category. There are just a few cases where there's still manual action required.

If you're looking for fully automated recognition of transactions, that might be useful for bookkeeping, but I think this creates too much distance between you spending money (and the application just confirming that) and the wish for conforming to your predefined budget.

Another trick I've seen people do, which is of course more time consuming, is manually enter every transaction into such a budgeting tool. This trick keeps you really close to your spending behaviour, instead of mindlessly looking at spending graphs after the fact. It gives you a chance to reevaluate with every transaction whether your everyday spending, or subscriptions, or other periodic spending is still needed, useful, and if cutting those costs might help you stay within budget, and maintaining your preferred quality of life.

[simonmic]

There are people experimenting; eg https://github.com/a-t-0/hledger-preprocessor

[Steffajos]

Try PocketGuard. It’s simple, tracks spending automatically, and sends spending alerts to keep you on track.

[charlie0]

I tried budgeting, but found it to be too much work because there's no perfect way to automate it. Also, if you are card churning you soon end up with many accounts to keep track of making manual tracking a real chore.

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.

[jppope]

on this topic what I really wish was that there was something that would actually stop me from spending when I'm over the budget. Attribution is nice, but organizing accounts or money folders that could just stop categorical spending would be preferable.

[withinboredom]

I built this. The card would halt the purchase if you were over budget. You could use a different pin if you wanted to override it. It turns out that this counted as “financial advice” in the legal sense. I ran away, as did any investors. It was cool though. I live in the EU now, so maybe the laws are different.

[cpeterson42]

Have tried a ton since Mint sunset, settled on Monarch as the best replacement

[andy_ppp]

I just did this and used the app Emma but it is awful at breaking down and categorising transactions and the analytics seems to take a back seat to selling you some debt or investments. I’m tempted to build my own to be honest I think there’s a lot you can do to help people understand savings and becoming wealthy over decades rather than becoming an overnight crypto billionaire.