Personal finance tracking tools

Personal finances
1

Hi,

Does anyone have experience with different tools for personal/family finance tracking and budgeting?

I’m looking for one myself. At least some desired features I’ve identified are, for example:

  • suitable for tracking the finances of the whole family, i.e., my wife and I use it together
  • data should be easily accessible from multiple devices: at least Android, iPad, and a web browser on a computer
  • monthly budgeting and transaction tracking
  • for some items, also longer-term budgeting, e.g., renovation budget and/or annual budget (insurance premiums)
  • internal fund allocation, i.e., savings goals for which money can be accumulated

Possibly some needs are still unidentified. YNAB and BudgetBakers’ WalletApp have made it to the final shortlist.

However, so that the discussion is not limited only to our needs, in the future, one could generally share what they use and/or also open up about their own wishes regarding such a system.

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2

Well, I haven’t actively looked for or sought out a suitable app or program myself. Years ago, I did look, but after trying a few budgeting and tracking programs, I switched back to Excel. And I’m still on that path :grin:

So, we use Excel with several different workbooks, and it has worked well enough for our needs.

In practice, we update the budget about once a year or if income changes. The money is then distributed to different accounts accordingly. So, it’s not as precise as you apparently had in mind, but it has been sufficient for us.

Then there are separate trackers for things like wealth and housing costs.

But, of course, some kind of “real-time” system that automatically fetches data would be much more convenient.

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Excel is certainly the most versatile, and you can do almost anything with it. The downside is precisely that same thing: you have to really create almost everything yourself, including the formulas. The templates I’ve seen for this purpose wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Yes, this can work if annual tracking is sufficient. Admittedly, I’m looking for pretty close to real-time tracking of expenses that can be easily influenced on a daily basis. The most significant of these are, of course, various household purchases, mainly food, and sometimes fuel.

Also, a year is such a long time that it’s difficult to make adjustments at that level if you want to influence things. For long-term major expenses (such as housing and perhaps insurance), this is, however, a perfectly good level.

Another big thing I wanted was the ability for both of us as a married couple to continuously enter transactions and, on the other hand, check if there’s any budget left.

The original thread starter is already old enough that I’ve started using YNAB. It’s expensive (relatively), but we got the first year for free because my wife is a student. It doesn’t support Finnish banks either, but I dug up an open-source tool for this (ynabber) and, as a geek, modified it to work with S-Pankki and Nordea (it probably works with other Finnish banks now too). Now, bank transactions also go through PSD2.

We’ll see in a year when the free period ends.

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4

I’ve been using the penno.fi service. It’s not perfect either, and you have to enter transactions manually, but recurring transactions can be automated.

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A really good point. I looked at it once and even registered there.

However, for our quite complex situation, it didn’t seem sufficient and doesn’t guide finances purposefully enough. For a smaller basic household where living off investments doesn’t (yet) play a big role, it might be enough. For us, however, there are several transactions every day, and I wanted to get more insight than just whether income covers expenses (they don’t, but that’s not the intention at this stage). As I recall, Penno also practically has no view of investments; everything is either income or expenses (there’s no “balance sheet” anywhere, i.e., debts and assets).

However, Penno is free, Finnish, and I believe it’s recommended by the Guarantee Foundation (Takuusäätiö). Definitely better than nothing, and you get some cash flow monitoring.

6

For over 10 years, I’ve been using an open-source program called Homebank to track my income and expenses: HomeBank | Free personal finance software, money management for everyone

It’s primarily designed for Linux, but I understand it also works on Windows and Mac. Every expense and income is recorded as its own transaction. Monthly recurring transactions, like salary and mortgage payments, can be automated, otherwise, you have to enter everything manually, although you can use predefined templates. I don’t really need full automation because, in practice, it’s quite impossible to implement if you, for example, pay for something with cash or buy groceries and clothes with a card at the same time, which would need to be put into different categories. Once all income and expenses are recorded in Homebank as individual transactions, I can get almost any statistics out of them afterward, and it also serves as good bookkeeping for what I bought, where, and at what price. For example, if I sell some electronics, I can quite easily find out what I paid for it and where I bought it. It’s perfectly sufficient for my needs.

As a coder, I personally don’t like using Excel for expense tracking because data in Excel isn’t usually in a truly machine-readable format: the computer doesn’t really understand what the numbers you’ve entered in different cells of an Excel sheet are, even if you’ve given some headings to the columns – of course, it depends a bit on how you’ve built your Excel model, but I would guess that many people only keep track of expenses in Excel on a monthly basis by category (e.g., Food €500 for August vs. recording all 10 grocery trips separately as €50 expenses). So, you might not be able to delve into expenses in more detail afterward using Excel, because you recorded them at too coarse a level initially and not as individual transactions. I can, if I want, export Homebank data into virtually any format – in fact, a couple of years ago, just for fun, I coded a React Native app that used Homebank data, though this project was then left somewhat unfinished due to lack of time and enthusiasm.

I don’t use nearly all of Homebank’s features; some are completely unnecessary for me, and the reporting features could use some improvement. But it’s easy to get monthly and category-level reports, for example. Recording expenses from a mobile app would also be convenient, but it has worked well just from a computer – save the receipts and then, for example, once a month, record everything at once.

As a matter of principle, I don’t want to pay anything for income and expense tracking, because one of its main purposes for me is precisely to cut unnecessary expenses, and using a paid service for this purpose would introduce a new expense item and would be somewhat against the main purpose. I also don’t want to commit to any particular commercial software, because you never know how long they will be around. It would certainly infuriate me if over 10 years of income and expense tracking data disappeared because the service provider decided to quit due to unprofitability, or if I couldn’t transfer the data to a new service provider.

I don’t really believe that such good software would even emerge where income and expense tracking would be automated in the Finnish market, everything would work on a phone, and it would be reasonably priced and on the market for over 10 years: saving and expense tracking is, after all, a niche thing, so I doubt it’s very profitable to make software for these people. Most Finns don’t care about their expenses, so I certainly wouldn’t even start making software for such a small target group.

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I could also use something like this if I were only doing it for myself. But for me, it’s important to be able to continuously check the budget situation. My wife also needs to be able to do that and input transactions.

This is a good point! I tried to proceed with this for a long time myself, but eventually concluded that a small ‘pain fee’ was necessary to get the features I wanted without having to constantly maintain them myself. Doing it together is especially important here when we’re talking about the whole family’s finances. Then, of course, I also needed to see things in real-time on my phone.

For a long time, the cost was also an obstacle for me. Eventually, I decided that a small price was worth it if it helped save at least €10/month overall. It also gives a better overall picture of where things stand. Free software (which I also use and contribute to) often tends to have various small things that need refining, and especially the most boring part, i.e., documentation, is very inadequate.

However, the YNAB (You Need A Budget) we use is free for a year due to a student discount, so we don’t have to pay that ‘pain fee’ yet, and even that doesn’t satisfactorily import all transactions automatically in Finland. However, I have built imports myself from open-source components. Only Crypto.com card transactions have to be imported quite manually. That is partly due to the insufficient import capabilities on Crypto.com’s side.

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I’ve been thinking for years whether I should do this kind of tracking and at what level—by total expenses (e.g., “food,” “clothing,” etc.) or with every purchase itemized (“cottage cheese,” “socks,” “juice,” etc.). I’ve even had a bit of a guilty conscience for not doing it, but on the other hand, if you feel like your finances are pretty well under control and the money allocated for the month is usually enough, do you even need to?

What usually makes these a drag is precisely that manual entry into apps. But as a tip, at least Lidl’s receipts are available digitally on your phone, and you can copy-paste from there to elsewhere. Apparently, it’s the same for the S Group (Ässä)?

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Yeah, S and K also offer digital receipts.

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This depends on what your goals are. If you aren’t aiming for anything specific, such as financial independence, then it’s probably enough. You don’t need to itemize everything manually either; there is help available for this, and usually the total amount of the purchase is sufficient.

However, if you have significant financial goals, properly understanding and managing expenses is important. These could include a down payment on a home, becoming debt-free, financial independence, etc. Even after achieving these, financial tracking is important so you don’t end up going from the frying pan into the fire—for example, getting back into debt or spending your wealth too quickly.

Even if you don’t want any of these, tracking your finances can still be helpful. Otherwise, “lifestyle inflation” can easily occur, which eats up all additional income. It’s common, for example, for extra income to leak into consumption instead of investments and the like.

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But they are just image copies. You can’t download them in a machine-readable format from anywhere.

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I personally use Spendee, which automatically fetches transactions from domestic bank accounts.

For a small fee, you can set up quite complex logic for categorizing payments. However, it just doesn’t seem to learn transfers between accounts at different banks.

3.8/5 - I recommend trying it on your phone instead of using Excel.

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I’ve been tracking income/expenses/savings at a high level this year, and even that has been quite a challenge! At this point in the year, I can say with some certainty—and a bit of surprise—that I won’t quite reach my target savings rate :frowning: Hobbies have been quite expensive, plus there’s been travel and other entertainment. But you’ve got to have those too.

Sometimes I’m completely at a loss with the cash flows in my bank transactions, moving money from a savings account through a checking account to a broker, lending to a friend one month and getting it back the next, receiving per diems and mileage reimbursements, etc. So it’s mostly been a learning curve on how to categorize each item—as income, expenses, or savings—to avoid distorting the reality of the situation. I’ve aimed for precision simply because I had such an ambitious goal for savings. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you need to update the tracking quite actively unless you want a headache later on.

At least now I know what my expenses look like under circumstances where I haven’t been watching them too closely. My goal for next year is to start tracking and even budgeting expenses a bit more precisely, now that I’ve gotten some practice at a coarser level. And I’m sure there’s room for some trimming.

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Yeah, almost daily review is indeed needed. Of course, I have a large family, shared finances with my wife, and even some of the company’s money is included there, as it’s effectively our income. Conversely, there are so-called mandatory business costs as well, which are actually taken out of our money and must be paid.

I also track those receivables. Especially from health insurance, we frequently receive reimbursements (e.g., for medications) that were originally paid out of pocket, so there are transaction-specific ‘waiting for refund’ tags. It would be even more complicated if there were so-called expense reimbursements (cash receipts) from an employer.

Yeah, a full year is usually needed. For example, many payments (insurance, car-related ‘annual costs’) are difficult to estimate correctly, and something is almost always forgotten. Once you complete one full year, you can see how much you need to set aside for the whole thing annually. Sometimes there are also larger, relatively easy areas to save on without lowering your standard of living, the impact of which only becomes apparent over a one-year period.

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On a side note. I’m updating my financial tracking and would need the quarterly values of my Nordea portfolio from last year. Can anyone tell me where this information can be found in Nordea’s service, or is it possible that the data cannot be viewed retroactively?

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Has an app been developed yet that can directly fetch and categorize online banking transactions? OP (Osuuspankki) has its own financial tracking, which is already quite good, but I’d like to get the transactions out of there for more detailed processing. Exporting to Excel would also be good.

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I have used a few methods for this over the years:

  • PDF ‘scraping’ → laborious but sometimes functional and requires expertise
  • Importing CSV and editing it into SQL or Excel (CSV can be exported from several online banks behind some button, e.g., transactions, etc.) This is also laborious in its own way, but something like Power Query can help a lot here. By modifying CSV appropriately, it can be imported into many other systems.
  • Register with Gocardless and link your bank account there with the PSD2 interface, and you can retrieve transactions as JSON. I recall there’s a time limit on how far back it goes – probably 90 days.
  • Nowadays, I use YNAB and a related tool called ynabber, which transfers transactions to YNAB using PSD2.

I can send you a link for the last one, which gives you a free month if you decide to go with it otherwise.

However, all these methods have their problems, and it’s not easy to make this fully automatic. When I tried to do it “a year at a time” retrospectively, it became quite difficult and laborious. Some counterparties are easy, but many are not, and transactions have to be allocated individually.

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Budget bakers wallet supports, among others, many banks, including Op.

Have used this for years. And there’s also investment tracking in the pipeline, which is still bad for my taste as it doesn’t support importing old data.

Edit:

Let me add that it wouldn’t be very laborious if everyone followed standardized naming conventions for each transaction type, e.g., the mentioned Op uses some of its own that differ from the program in question.

However, I haven’t found it to be a problem as it runs on web and phone/tablet and can filter and edit data in multitasking. So, with relatively little effort.

Nowadays, it seems to be a monthly/yearly paid service.

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