I can’t share unfortunately, too many personal changes and modifications.
What works for me is getting the CSV from banks/cards/wise. Edit the CSV removing/rearranging columns (manual or macro) and I just take the date - ammount - currency - shop/text. Plop it into my excel sheet with raw expense data. Leaves 3 columns empty which are drop downs on named ranges. This is the expense classification, sub category and source (which card) which are all drop-downs. All done with keyboard one-letter lookups so very quick. Could automate with some logic to pre-fill the cat/subcat based on vendor/text.
The actual summary is then on other sheet, monthly/quarterly/yearly with some SUMIFS which summarize by column/row and date range fitting into that month/quarter/year. So its all automated, only touch the raw expense sheet fed through CSV.
Hope this helps a bit.
I use an excel sheet for expenses. But I have plans on making an app for that.
I have made an app, not for expenses, but for calculating when you will achieve a certain goal, how much you need to save per month, stuff like that. I really hope I don’t break any rules if I share it here. Let me know and I’ll delete this post.
It is available on Google Play:
The calculation also works on loans. Just type in a negative start amount.
The app is called Monix, but anyone who wants to find the app probably needs to search 3well4pin, which is the developer account, to find it in Google Play.
I discovered that Firefly doesn’t handle “negative expenses”, so like when I pay the rent to my landlord and my gf pays me half, now in the reports I’m actually spending double on rent but somehow also have income rent which from a theoretical POV is I guess correct but kind of besides the point. So now I’m leaning towards excel sheet again but I wonder if auto categorizing transactions and also handling duplicates will be easy or not.
I mean this in case your spreadsheet already handles that and you could share that portion but maybe not. I guess take it as feedback for the app you want to build. I was hoping that an app to categorize expenses with some rules and generate some simple reports would be super easy to find but apparently there really isn’t one
It’s really something I made for myself, fitting my own need but I could try to clean it up and make a template out of it. If I have time during holidays maybe, I let you know if I have something to share.
I’ve used Google Sheets for quite a while and I also wanted to have the ability to import expenses from the bank, but I couldn’t find any apps that offered this feature. Also I wanted bank SMS/Push notifications to be processed automatically, but I couldn’t find such functionality anywhere. In the end, I wrote an app for myself (I’m a programmer)
If you’re interested, you could try MasMoney.
Moneywizz is imo the best alternative to YNAB. Sadly there is no web version when using it from a PC. Therefore it is only available as a Mac OS App. The iOS version works perfect fine, only the synchronisation between device is limited to Apple ecosystem.
As standalone and, let’s say offline app, MoneyManager is quite good as expense tracking. You can try the free version, it contains already tons of features. There is no native synchronisation between device as the database is stored on your device.
I tried Toshl but don’t like the way they integrated the credit card tracking.
Didn’t have the time yet to set it up myself but during my research a while ago I found “Firefly III”.
It’s open source, you run it on your own docker container and highly customizable. There is also a third-party app which directly connects to your Firefly instance here.
Again haven’t tried it myself yet but it seems very powerful but at the same time it’s definetly not as “plug-n-play” as other solutions out there.
Firefly seems great but definitely not easy to get started and it will be next to impossible to setup for some people namely because of docker and self hosting it. I use docker for work and at some point I set it up. It didn’t take a long time and it is quite powerful but as with a lot of open source projects that are mostly managed by one developer it has some quirks and oddities that might be deal breakers.
For me it was the fact that it doesn’t support “negative expenses”. After talking to the developer it seems that this will never be a thing so for me that experience ended there.
This is because at work there are a lot of shared lunch meals. I pay for 100CHF, split it between 4 people so in the days after I get 75CHF back. That’s actually the main reason why I want an expense tracking app is to track that I spent 25CHF for lunch that day (or most importantly, the sum at the end of the month). Instead Firefly treats the 100CHF as one category, and then the 75CHF as income which then also messes up with my savings rate.
I did the free trial of LunchMoney for a bit and it seemed promising. The Wealth tracking bit was unnecessarily limited (for some reason it can’t complete the total wealth for past dates even with all the transactions added). It was paid but the subscription model was quite fair IMO.
I still haven’t found something that suits my needs which is rather annoying, and as such I have been postponing my budget analysis.
I am currently considering switching to Actual Budget, as it closely looks like YNAB with the same functions (better reports !), and I plan to host it on a VPS.
The advantages of Actual Budget, being open-source, include:
• No cost for the app
• Full control over my data
• The ability to build and host it almost anywhere I choose.
Can you tell me if it has “negative expenses” and if you can import data from Swiss banks/credit cards without too much hassle? (I know that integrations are very limited with Swiss banks)
I don’t think I tried that one when I last had time to give them a try so maybe it will suit my needs
Simply click on “Don’t use a server” to test it with the demo dataset.
However, to my knowledge, integration with Swiss banks is not yet available. Since the project is open source, it’s possible that someone might develop a solution in the future. The main issue seems to lie on the banks’ side, as they are generally not open or ready to provide access to their systems.
Think about it like this: anything where you have to enter or categorize transactions manually helps you to understand your spending much faster, and the annoyance of it might make you rethink some transactions.
Not only my conclusions, I might have caught up on that from an often-mentioned book in earlier FIRE forums (Your money or your life, maybe?).
Anyway, anything following basic double-entry booking should be able to handle your lunch example. And sure, you can point-out some open-source stuff has “quirks and oddities”, but so could others about how you people organize your lunch
I would like to track my expenses in an Excel sheet from January onwards. Which main categories do you use to categorise your expenses? The Poor Swiss use the following categories.
Insurances
Transportation
Communications
Personal
Food
Housing
Taxes
What I like is the category ‘Personal’, I can well imagine having subcategories there.
Mine looks very similar, in German though.
Some sub-accounts, like premiums, bills and reimbursements in health, or car and public in transportation. If communications is internet etc. that’s under housing, similar to utilities.
By reading and partipating to this forum, you confirm you have read and agree with the disclaimer presented on http://www.mustachianpost.com/
En lisant et participant à ce forum, tu confirmes avoir lu et être d'accord avec l'avis de dégagement de responsabilité présenté sur http://www.mustachianpost.com/fr/
Durch das Lesen und die Teilnahme an diesem Forum bestätigst du, dass du den auf http://www.mustachianpost.com/de/ dargestellten Haftungsausschluss gelesen hast und damit einverstanden bist.
