Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

97 points · dyeje · 11 days ago

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.

109 comments

anthropodie · 11 days ago

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 · 11 days ago

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.

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rocketpastsix · 11 days ago

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.

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jjice · 10 days ago

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.

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redditor98654 · 10 days ago

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.

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