How do you manage your finances as an Indie Hacker?

Spreadsheets was my answer for a long time too. The control is unmatched — you see exactly what's happening and nothing is hidden behind an algorithm. The problem was always maintenance. One chaotic month and the whole system collapses.
What finally worked for me was stripping it down to the absolute minimum. No bank sync, no auto-categorisation, no dashboard that updates itself. Just envelope budgeting — you decide where every dollar goes before you spend it, then log what actually happened. Manual by design.
I ended up building exactly that as a side project — a single HTML file that runs offline, no account needed. Variable income months are actually easier to manage this way because you're budgeting from what you have right now, not a projected average.
For separating personal and business finances — I keep them as different monthly setups within the same file. Different envelopes, same workflow.

So much pain in this area :)

I use Sheets, Excel to build financial models, for my private life, and seperate ones for my businesses. I also digitize all paper and file it. No specific app for business or private finances, only some more basic stuff, like a file exchange software from my tax advisor (based in DE, therefore using DE-focussed Datev software) and online banking via bank websites.

https://pry.co/