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

>> Microsoft announced this past week that they are going to be releasing an app to help manage money, called Money in Excel. The new feature will be a part of Microsoft 365 and is going to mirror many of the features and qualities available in the tech giant’s Excel spreadsheets both in appearance and the way it works. With the new app, users will be able to sync their credit card and bank accounts to it in order to automatically keep track of purchases, deposits, and each accounts’ balance. Money in Excel will be able to help users identify trends and patterns in their spending along with several key components to keep users up-to-date on their accounts. (Source: Motley Fool) (Note: My company, The Marks Group PC, is a Microsoft partner).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/04/12/mi...

Is Mint's budget still based on an estimation of income and not real income/cash-on-hand?

This is an aside, but there are basically two ways to do budgeting:

Forecasting (what most people think of as budgeting) where you assume some average inflow and calculate the average/target outflow for various categories for each month. This doesn't work with irregular income unless you set your outflow to below your average inflow (which may not be easy to predict for freelancers, part-time workers, or people who get tips).

Actual budgeting where you take the existing cash on hand and designate/allocate it for spending categories. I have (made up numbers) $5k on hand, I have to pay my mortgage ($1500) leaves me with $3500. I set some aside for groceries ($400) leaves me with $3100. Repeat until this month's categories are done, put any excess into the next month. Maybe I have $1k free after budgeting so I can put $1k to next month's mortgage. Then on my next paycheck I can budget the remaining $500 to that and start on other categories. At the end of this exercise, I know my money will get me through this month (or not) and how much further it'll go.

Of the two formats, the former only works if you have a regular paycheck and very little deviation in spending from month to month. The latter works very well for many more people in a variety of situations because it is based on reality.

While I use YNAB and would recommend it, there are other systems out there that do the same thing. And I've used ledger-cli for it as well (but really wanted the mobile interface and something my wife would use). You can start with either as an expense tracker, and then after a month or two (once you've tracked your spending so you know your current level) you can switch to using them as budgeting tools (YNAB does that out of the box, ledger-cli takes a bit more work).

In my opinion budgeting apps conflate accounting with budgeting.

Categorizing bank charges is accounting. Spending money then categorizing expenses is a terrible way to budget in my experience. It’s backwards.

I separate my income into different accounts, then spend from those accounts.

This has many advantages:

- Not possible to overspend.

- Extra money rolls over.

- No time wasted accounting, labeling, reconciling, etc.

- No need to share transaction history or credentials with budgeting apps.

Privacy.com let’s you create virtual credit cards with spending limits. That’s the closest thing to my ideal budgeting app, but the limitation is I can’t withdraw cash.

The app I want is a bank that can easily create multiple accounts and associated debit cards.

Before online shopping this was simple, I just had to take out the cash I needed for the different categories and keep them separate.