Collaborative budgeting app
Hey folks,
Oleg, a newcomer is here.
I've been into personal financial planning for a little while, like a few years. It helps a lot in understanding where the money goes, which expenses to cut and what I can afford. After multiple experiments, I'd come up with a simple ledger table, which I suspect is very similar to what accountants use or banks keep internally, where I put all the transactions and calculate a "running total" (so nice that I had to look this up and find the term!).
Example of a table: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eWHv4fv0d-Mcfffue3iJ0rjxAXjQezA2l0ctNhL97JE/edit?usp=sharing
It's basically represents what I use for my personal financing. What's interesting is that I not only want to have a positive "closing balance", that is amount of money at the end of period, but also avoid possible cash gaps since they can be quite a bummer if you have no savings. To indicate that, I use conditional formatting and then when planning I can re-order prospective expenses around usually fixed dates I get my paycheck. It helps but it's quite a hassle to create that table manually every now and then. Also, what's lacking is a distinction between the plan and the reality.
Now that I've become married, everything became even more complicated. We have a joint budget and we want to both keep an eye on expanding unplanned expenses and properly plan the budget for the future, initially short to mid term (months to years). I need a collaborative solution that we can use together with my wife, so we:
a) plan things together and put them into the app as a baseline
b) save everyday expenses - thankfully, we have this habit already
c) see in some form amount of money we can spend every day to stay within the planned budget.
Apparently, it will be used on different devices but let's keep the tech details out for starters. Have you ever seen any application like that? I genuinely need one but don't know how to find - what I've been looking for a while ago had turned me to the spreadsheets since they're more easy to use.
Thank you for you time,
And good luck with your endeavors!
@oleggromov - A love me some personal finance!
The way my wife and I solve this is..... with a google spreadsheet :)
It's a bit more complicated than your example, but with it, we can:
Like you, I've looked around and tried different budgeting apps (YNAB, Mint), and nothing has really been satisfactory. But for now, a manual sheet is fine... though I'd love to get around to building a full app someday!
Hey David,
Thanks for responding first of all.
I think that coupling a spreadsheet with a google form that will allow you populate spreadsheet in an more handy way is a good to go option for us and this task. Having convoluted UIs scares off immediately and totally looks unneeded.
Could you possibly clean up your spreadsheets from the personal stuff and share a template? It could help me, Thomas and others as well.
And the last question, do you somehow monitor how much money you could spend daily/weekly or alike? So as opposed to planning, do you actually control how you're doing?
We don't say "we have $200 left this month, divide this amount by # of days remaining and that's allowed per diem", if that's what you're asking.
In general, I don't like to think about it day-to-day (other than inputting expenses), so I just let it ride. My wife and I do pretty good about spreading out expenses so I haven't had any urge to say "I can only spend $X today".
I have a friend who used to use an app that was tied to a debit card. The app had specific categories that my friend defined with a $/limit per month. When charging on that card, he would select the category about to spend. If there wasn't enough money left in that category, the card would get declined. I don't think that company/app is in business anymore though :-/
I'm away on travels, but when I'm back I'll see if I can build an example based on my spreadsheet. It is a pretty scary UI though, as it has listed out priority, category/subcategory, budget $, spent $, and more in a table! So it's pretty dense in terms of data.
David, I got you. Happy traveling! 🌎
I was asking more of something similar to what you friend used. I want to know if I set a limit of $300 monthly for going out, how much I can spend till the end of month? Or alternatively, for this dinner we unexpectedly decided to have out.
Generally speaking, I also used to "letting it ride during the month" and then correcting the expectations and discussing our priorities and plans, say, in the end of it. And it worked decently. However, it has stopped recently and I realize that I lose consciousness with my spendings. I tend to overestimate the pre-planned costs and think like "wasn't it these $300 for eating out last month" whereas in reality it could have easily been twice less for this month. And also small but frequent expenses are really hard to notice and they quickly add up becoming a sound overall expense category.
My best guess now is that if I saw "$10 is left for coffee this week" I would rather postpone a purchase for tomorrow so I can have a cup on Sunday too instead of buying it right away and doing so 10 times because I simply don't remember how much I've already spent 🤯
I'm planning to solve this problem with https://budget-fox.com/ though I haven't gotten round to get much into details (you can add users and it stores who created a transaction, but not much beyond that).
I'd be looking for to have you as a test user as you match my ideal user! Feel free to send me feedback what sort of reports you want to have (say who spends more on food), most those things are easy to implement.
Hi Thomas!
Haha, you seem to be building exactly what I look for - "a budgeting app for families and couples with a focus on long-term planning" 👏 Sounds amazingly cool!
I'll try to help you out a bit with the feedback that pops out in my head based on what I do myself.
What I'm currently using is a table similar to what I shared and a "ledger" kept in the Notes app. It's literally 1 line of text for each "transaction" and I record only spendings. So naturally fixing the spendings is a very-very cheap operation. My wife does the same but sends it to me instead of saving to her local app.
Analysis is not what I do regularly because I usually understand what we spend money for and we tend to plan relatively big expenses, even such as clothes. So usually we don't drift too far away from the planned budget. Sometimes, however, I simply put all the numbers to a table, group them almost manually in categories and see what new trends are there. Like "we've been spending more on coffee outside since the fall came".
What's totally missing is at-the-moment understanding of whether or not we're on budget with this purchase you're going to make. Sometimes it's an unexpectedly nice dress for my wife or a toy for my kid or a 20st cup of coffee in my favorite cafe. I think it's kind of a combination of a running sum with the planned expenses, the plan matched to the real spendings history given in a single period.
Is your process any similar to this?
Here's three screenshots, the dashboard (it will get a little more info over the next weeks) and the account view which is very close to what you have in mind and the envelope view. There's a few more.
https://twitter.com/budgetfuchs/status/1061163373784641536
I am dealing with the same issue now with my wife. Mint is single person, ynab i'm not a huge fan of their interface/process.
Brian, thank you for amazing references!
Because of living out of the US I never heard of any of those.
So Mint looks really cool and definitely an overkill. Moreover, their integrations with banks won't work outside western countries as well as credit score calculator. But anyways, the app looks cool and top notch and it will be hard to compete with anything like that. (Yes, I'm thinking about implementing some solution possibly).
YNAB... Well, this frame has scared me off forever https://youtu.be/xPVEB759gkU?t=173
It shouldn't be or at least look that complicated 😂
What I imagine is UI similar to Todoist app. Clean, concise, effective.
Anyways, thank you for your links and response! If I find something I will share it on IH.
Yeah YNAB is an interesting thing with people coming up with interesting solutions for their problems. I know because I follow a german inofficial forum.
Clean UI is hard :(
Btw, does your bank support exporting your data as CSV or similar? Often the only thing you can do outside US/CAN/EU.
Definitely it does.
Honestly, I think I don't even need precise matching to bank account spending because I've successfully developed a habit of writing down every expense worth more than a $1. But as an icing on the cake it could be cool to have such a thing.
Also, after doing budgeting in Numbers/Notes for at least last 3 years and comparing it to a simple tool I created for myself last year, I wouldn't expect much value from any integration. But I could be terribly wrong, for sure, and for different users it could be a killer feature.
My line of thinking. I still do it manually once a week, actually summing up those small transactions I spend on groceries as I don't need all that detail.
I've used YNAB for two years and it's wonderful.
Their automatic transaction import is a game-changer.
It definitely takes time to figure out the concepts, but you sound pretty motivated!
https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=pnPV1oqAP-ZfH0oI&utm_source=customer_referral << you get an extra free month w/ this link. :)
Hi Oleg,
I have spent quite a bit of time on this very subject myself, lately. I am currently playing around with an app called spendee (for ios, android and web). This is a saas, but they currently run a lifetime deal. It definately has some bugs, but also a bunch of neat features. It automatically pulls all transactions from my account, and they seemingly also allow shared wallets. I have also been using spiir, but at this point, I think its good for scandinavian users, unfortunately. May be worth a shot..
Hi Oleg!
I'm doing what you might find interesting. https://moneypin.io/
It is in private beta right now. I have support for transaction entry and right now working on budgeting (so you can know how much money you are gonna have by the end of the month/quarter/year).
You can sign in and I'd be glad to speak with you about what you might need, me email is s.kwee357@gmail.com
Best!
I've been using Beancount for this, and it works fantastic.
I'm a bit paranoid about using cloud-based services for my financial data, so any app that syncs data across multiple devices was something I ruled out right from the beginning. And Beancount is what I ended up using.
I blogged about my setup recently. Hope this helps!
hey fellow bavarian with a curious name :) (of course I mean that the SaaS I work on is called budgetfuchs/budget-fox)
yes, how much can you trust cloud-based service is a real problem. But then, most users will happy use freeware or free SaaS without giving a thought about how the developer/company makes a cent.
Great you mention plain text accounting, I've been using hledger for some time and recommend it to anyone with a liking for text files.
The curious name is because I'm not a native Bavarian. But I realized a few weeks back that I've now started to replace German words with their Boarische counterparts, so it looks like the conversion is ongoing. :)
BudgetFuchs looks quite interesting. I also see some parts from plain text accounting here and there, so it definitely feels familiar.
Two questions -
I have a three-yr-old I have to teach bavarian, we live in Austria...
Well-spotted on the influence, the very free input for account names and currencies (I call them unit because it's a text-field). there's an import for hledger files (possibly other similar formats).
Yes, I've started connecting with finapi.io, matching transactions to accounts and whatnot is hard and I have signed any contract with them yet. no point for that before I feel confident the app finds users.
Self-hosted is something I can't find a decent solution yet, and importing via finapi wouldn't happen then :(
But, have a try, use it for some one-off project where you have to collab with others. I did a year-long project for our hackerspace in gnucash once and it was painful, it shouldn't be with budgetfuchs. I'd be curious to see that sort of thing happen.
Would it be possible to bundle it into a desktop app somehow? I'm not sure what technologies you're using to build this, but there are some tools in the Python ecosystem that let you compile Django-like apps into a desktop app. Maybe there's something similar in the stack you're using?
I ask because I recently spoke at a local Python meetup about Beancount and a lot of the people I talked to were looking for solutions where they know that the data does not leave their laptops.
Rails and Mongodb, I'd rather not bundle that into a desktop app, if it were possible.
Oone point about a webapp (or mobile app) is that you can type in your transactions as they happen; far away from the desktop. Those desktop apps that actually come with a full nodejs and chrome packaged in, I think it's a wasteful approach.
Siddhant, that sounds very interesting and promising. I will read your blog posts and the Beancount docs, which seem to have nice explanatory parts, and reply to you here :-)
Happy hacking!
Hi Oleg, I believe we have spoken before but I can't say with certainty! I am working on budgetwise.io which uses a method called zero-sum budgeting, similar to YNAB but still very early in development.
With zero sum budgeting, you basically only budget the amount of money you have now, and spread it out so it pays what you need until the next time you get paid. This is very effective because you can track exactly how much of your current money you are spending, and don't have to spend so much effort forecasting future months, especially because anything can suddenly change and now your forecasts all need to be redone.
The problem with Mint and other similar programs is that you don't really get a good idea of how you did until after the month ends, and by that point its too late to change anything.
Without even using an app, you could do a simple version of this at home using only envelopes. Take all of the money you have now, and split it up into categories, one envelope per category. Make sure you label each one! When you spend from one envelope, you will immediately know how much you have left for this time period, and this is the whole process in a nutshell. Id be happy to answer any questions you have though!
And also, is it collaborative, i.e. can we have a joint account with my wife/kids?
Hi Alonso!
I'm sorry to say it's the first notion of Budgetwise for me. But looks really cool! I'll read through your help center and consider joining for a trial. However, what pops up immediately in my head is a) could I import my prior transactions? and b) what about security and if I want to wipe out my data from your service? 🧐
The idea with envelopes is a smart one, although I don't use cash that much anymore. So I'll have to create virtual "envelopes" and it'll quickly escalate to creating an app 🤭
I also have a couple questions about your service if you don't mind discussing. First, I heard that people usually don't like to pay for "useful" things whereas a budgeting app is definitely more of "useful" than "fun". It's like you pay to restrict yourself or something. I assume not everybody will appreciate that. What are your thoughts on that?
Second, I noticed from the feature list on your website that it's pretty rich in terms of functionality. Is it that you use that yourself, or you surveyed real users or how have you come up with exactly these features?
Thanks for your time and answers in advance!
Best of luck! 🍻
Hi Oleg:
I'm creating a financial platform that might be in your alley.
Take it for a test drive and let me know what you think. Would love to get your feedback.
www.budgetpolitan.com
Thanks.
I spoke with a coworker about his solution to this problem. He opened sourced it here: https://github.com/AaronBratcher/Money-Trak
Hi Logan, thanks for your reply!
It seems your friend gave up on idea (the last update 2 years ago).
Also any chance you know where to get screenshots of the app? I have no idea how to install and check it quickly without launching XCode, emulators, downloading all the stuff, struggling with version mismatches after those 2 years and so.Update: Found it on App Store. Seems your friend and I wanted to answer the same question of how much to spend. Will try it out.