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Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

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Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#1

Post by beartech »

I started budgeting years ago and I was never able to find an app (or even webapp) capable of doing so for me. Perhaps I didn't search enough.. budgeting apps that come to see this thread in the future, please don't judge me :)

Some of them integrate with your bank account, credit card and I'm not really interested in this sort of stuff. I don't want 3rd party apps having access to whatever my bank produces, not to mention that are hundreds of banks out there and I'd assume that making those integrations are in fact a big deal and possibly dangerous (for a security point of view).

In my specific case, it all started with a local spreadsheet on my laptop, that later became a google forms (I wanted to save new transactions "on the go" and also share it with my wife) and now I'm going to build yet another budgeting app for my needs. Nothing fancy, but just something helpful and makes me proud of.

If you are using a budgeting app already, what's missing?

If you wish to use one, what sort of features would you look for?

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#2

Post by jkeuhlen »

Basically every major budgeting app I've looked at doesn't allow rolling buckets of money. For example, my wife and I budget $X per month for travel, but we only travel once or twice a year. What I'd really like to be able to do is allocate some amount every month to certain activities and have my budget keep track of how much I've saved for that purpose.

On the other side, sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile our food budget between months. If we have a big grocery trip on the last day of the month, we kind of expect to spend less the next month but won't always remember that when we go reconcile our budget.

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#4

Post by Jtsummers »

jkeuhlen wrote: post #2

Basically every major budgeting app I've looked at doesn't allow rolling buckets of money. For example, my wife and I budget $X per month for travel, but we only travel once or twice a year. What I'd really like to be able to do is allocate some amount every month to certain activities and have my budget keep track of how much I've saved for that purpose. On the other side, sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile our…

YNAB does that. It's one of the things that keeps me on it. My wife is going home to Argentina in October for a month, we've started setting aside an amount of money each month to cover her costs while there (she'll be staying with family so this is money to cover meals/drinks out and things she wants to buy there that aren't easy to get here). The amount builds up to our target for this trip.

The same thing for groceries or any other category. If I budget $300/month normally for groceries, but only spend $200 this month, I have $100 leftover for next month. I can choose to budget the full $300 like normal (have a balance of $400 available) or just $200 to bring it up to my target balance.

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#5

Post by jdtbuchanan »

Rolling daily budgets for incidental expenses. Any budgeting tool I've used has focused on Monthly budgets. I don't find this helpful for small things like lunches out, drinks with friends, etc. If I get a notice that I've hit my budget on the 20th of the month. I'm not going to just stop doing anything social for 10 days which makes the budget kind of useless. However, if I allocate $20 each day I'm much more likely to look at the app and decide what I'm going to spend based what I've accumulated and as long as I don't end the month negative I'll be on budget.

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#7

Post by saddestcatever »

Similar to what others are suggesting:

Month-to-month doesn't work.

Mint's budget breakdown totally fails if my Landlord cashes my check too early/late.

Month-to-month doesn't work for expenses that aren't monthly. Example: travel.

Month-to-month doesn't work when the calendar lines up and you get 3 paychecks that month instead of the normal 2.

I'd be curious for a budgeting app that still has the concept of a month, but isn't locked to calendar dates.

Rolling average? Bucketed allotments that roll over? Maybe

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#8

Post by Spivak »

The ability to automatically rename transactions to more friendly names but not break future imports.

* Let me create a payee like "Amazon" and define some rules to map transactions to them. Make sure there's some flexibility. Regex would be nice but probably doesn't have to be that powerful. Things like "AMZN MKTP%" and "AMAZON.COM%".

* Make sure that for all functions in your UI/API/whatever that the transactions are as if they were all to the single payee "Amazon."

* But, and this is the thing that other budget software gets wrong, keep the original transaction around so that when I reimport my transactions they get mapped correctly.

Support payment apps like Venmo/CashApp without having to treat them like this weird account. I get that's how accountants do it but I just want to import my Venmo and link the transactions.

* If I split something with someone then only count the money I spent toward my budget category. Other apps add this as a "credit" to the category which, while works, is silly and gives a distorted picture of my spending. I buy $60 worth of food for friends but I only spend $10 then I want the $50 be its own thing and moved out of the category once linked. I should be able to do this with cash too. Give me the option to hide such transactions since they're not really mine and just noise to my spending.

* Similarly, let me choose how I want joint spending to work. If me and my husband have a joint checking account in addition to our personal accounts and I set a global rule like "keep under $200 for groceries" then allow me to decide whether I want $200 spent from the joint account to count as $200 or $100 (or really any split I suppose).

Make income work less silly than imaginary infinity dollar accounts. Behind the scenes do what you gotta do but make it okay to have money appear from nowhere. I don't want my stimulus check to live in an imaginary "The Fed." Accountants I guess love it but it's just noise to me.

Another one for managing multiple accounts and marriage/roommates. Allow creating account-local, person-local, and global rules and buckets for everything.

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#9

Post by Jtsummers »

I use YNAB right now. It works pretty well, but I have a few issues:

Multi-currency support requires setting up multiple budgets and switching between them. For a while I needed to track both USD and ARS, but the ARS was for a much smaller amount and limited scope. It was annoying having to switch between the budgets when I was traveling in Argentina, but still had to manage things in the US.

Multi-month view. YNAB4 had it, it was great, YNAB5 dropped it. This let me easily see trends over recent months for the same category, and could budget ahead more easily as I started getting ahead on my money (I liked budgeting ahead more than setting up an emergency fund category, made it clear how far ahead I was, and in the worst case I'd take money from 1-3 months out to use for present day emergencies).

Choice between rolling over funds or releasing them at the end of a time period. If I budget $200 for groceries and only use $150, in YNAB it automatically makes that $50 extra available the next month. I want that. But that's not always the case, I'd like the option of releasing the funds at the end of the budget period. Let's say I budget $500 for a trip, and only spend $400, that extra $100 would be better served (for me) freed up and applied to another category, as my travel (especially these days) is infrequent.

Alternate time periods. jdtbuchanan also mentioned this. I budget $100/month for eating lunch at work, spread over 20 work days (most months) means $5/day. But if my team and I go out for an expensive lunch, I'll hit the limit much earlier. So the spending is within my budget, but not the intent of my budget. I'd like to be able to see daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-annual/annual budget options (at least the periods below a month, budgeting for quarterly expenses with a monthly budget works, but budgeting for daily/weekly expenses doesn't work as well).

Re: Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

#10

Post by Jtsummers »

saddestcatever wrote: post #7

Similar to what others are suggesting: Month-to-month doesn't work. Mint's budget breakdown totally fails if my Landlord cashes my check too early/late. Month-to-month doesn't work for expenses that aren't monthly. Example: travel. Month-to-month doesn't work when the calendar lines up and you get 3 paychecks that month instead of the normal 2. I'd be curious for a budgeting app that still has the concept of a month,…

The biggest problem with tools like Mint's is that it's not really a budget. It's a way to say "I don't want to spend more than X in a time period" but it says nothing about how much money you have now for spending. YNAB's approach (not unique to them but particularly pushed by them) is much better, where you only budget/allocate money you have. So I send in my check for my water bill, I have the money now. If they don't cash it until next month that's fine, my YNAB budget still has that money marked for that spending. I had the same issue with rent, where I'd pay it at the end of the month, but half the time it was cashed the next month. So every other month I'd spend double what was expected (for the month), and Mint went nuts. YNAB doesn't care.
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