Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

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

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.

"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.

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.

I've faced this as well. One of the big sources of "mess" for me in a years-long ledger is inconsistencies in account naming. I get around this with a big block of alias that rename accounts to use my newer, preferred conventions (without having to comb through possibly hundreds of postings to update by hand).

I also went through a couple file organization schemes and have (tentatively) settled on file-per-month since that leads to a nice cadence where setting up the new monthly file coincides with paying bills and is a good time to do any necessary account reconciliation.