How do you track your finances?
Recently attended a workshop, and I'm curious to know how you track your finances. Personally, I've built a custom spreadsheet, and I'm happy with that, but I'd love to see how other people are doing it.
- Do you use a spreadsheet? Did you build it yourself? Did you buy one that was already done for you?
- Do you use an accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho, etc.)?
- How do you like your current solution? Is it too complicated? Is it too overkill in terms of features for your needs?
- What would make it better for you?
In the workshop, they recommended also using tracking tools like Mint to follow all your expenses, not just business, but also, personal.
I'd be curious to know how many other people track it all to the penny like this.
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I use YNAB for my personal accounts, which is useful for monitoring day-to-day spending and budgeting. For my investments, I use Wealthica which I'm not in love with but some of the alternatives that look nicer are only available to Americans and American-based accounts (I'm from Canada and that's where my accounts are, currently living in Spain at the moment).
I'm only just about to kick off my indie hacker business, but planning to use Wave (waveapps.com). I've used them briefly in the past and like how lightweight it is (and free for basic accounting). At a past startup with more complex finances we used Quickbooks Online but honestly I was not a fan of it and wouldn't do it again.
Totally get you! Quickbooks is really overkill and no one really understand the platform apart from maybe accountants... Not useful 😂
Wave and YNAB indeed look like great platforms, the problem I have is that I have both a Canadian and an European bank account, and so far, most tools are mostly for only US or Canadian banks :(
Another vote for Wave. It's a joy to use
I'm mostly a computer person but I use Wallet app on iOS to track my finances. I've been trying lots of budget apps and stick with this since last year. It has a great interface, handles multiple currencies and several accounts. They also have a web app, not a big fan of the design but could be useful. I highly recommend you to check it out.
budgetbakers.com
That's the one I use, but currently I have issues with one of my bank account. The connection stopped working, and I can't reconnect it... Wanting on the support to fix it.
I use a google sheet for personal finances, but Quickbooks for my business finances (at the insistence of my CPA... which kinda sucks, because I don't love the platform and really hate their customer service.)
I totally get you, I don't like most accounting software neither. What would you with that you could have in your spreadsheet?
And what do you not like from the platform in Quickbooks?
The spreadsheet isn't automated (as in, I manually log in and get info from my accounts every month and then enter it into the spreadsheet) - but part of the reason I'm using a spreadsheet and not a platform is that my husband doesn't trust the security of a lot of the online banking stuff, and since our finances are intertwined...
Quickbooks just makes everything more complicated than I feel like it needs to be. The process of reconciling accounts and tagging expenses is not intuitive. I'm sure it would work better if I paid more to be able to accept payments via their invoicing system, but I'm not gonna do that. And the couple of times I've contacted customer service, the experience has been incredibly frustrating.
Totally get it, I know exactly what you're talking about ahah
I use manager.io for my company and it gives me all I need to manage the finances for my software agency.
Awesome, I had never heard of it, it seems decent, thanks for sharing :)
I use YNAB for everything, and it's great. Granted, I'm in a place right now where I don't really need to do any accounting, so that may be what's saving me from also having to use accounting software on top of that.
I've been really happy using Tiller. It pretty much lives on top of Google Sheets, makes it easy to pull in transactions, categorize them, budget, etc. Good middle ground between a full-blown app and a dumb sheet.
https://www.tillerhq.com/
100%, it definitively looks great! Only sad problem that I am facing everywhere is the supported banks... I'm in a special situation where I have both a Canadian and an European bank account, and in most cases only one of the two is supported, and sometimes none of them...
Paper and pencil w/ the help of various banking apps & their summary graphs.
Interesting, I'm curious, is there a reason why you pick paper more than a spreadsheet for example?
Because I believe physical anything helps me connect closer with the topic. For finance, it needs to feel real or else I won’t pay much attention.
That's a good point and good approach!
I have several friends that are single founders/ entrepreneurs that use https://www.freshbooks.com/ and they swear by it. I am not a user of it but am leaning that way.
Can't find their supported banks anywhere, does it not connect to banks directly?
Depending on what country you are in they have 3 ways to connect. https://support.freshbooks.com/hc/en-us/categories/202576498-Expenses-Bank-Connections
Thanks, will look into it :)
Good luck with whatever you choose. Or develop ;)
If you are a spreadsheet person, check out https://www.budgetsheet.net to help you import all your bank transactions easier.
Looks good thanks for sharing, I think that once they implement a bit more banks, it might be a solution to consider for me. I'm curious, do you feel there's anything missing in your spreadsheet?
I use a combination of Mint and a custom Excel sheet I built. Mint is total garbage, the only thing it does well is consolidate transactions from multiple accounts and give you a current snapshot of your balance sheet. Trends is totally useless. Investments is useless. Autocategorization sucks. Bank transfers from one account to another get categorized as income and expenses all the time. Refunds get categorized as income. I don't have time to review all my transactions and categorize them in the proper buckets, though I would probably do it if I could get some proper financials. All I want is a good monthly income statement, balance sheet and cash flow, and that's what I use excel for. So I let mint consolidate my transactions, I export them from Mint to Excel and then generate my financials. It's a pita, but I don't know of anything better. I don't do any budgeting.
That's totally true, most apps like Mint are terrible at categorizing transactions, it even makes me wonder why they are still in business...
Fore sure, monthly income statement, balance sheet and cash flow are definitively some of the most useful metrics to follow.
My main bank used to have a very nice feature where it showed you how much money you spend on food, clothing, etc. Sadly, the bank just decided to no longer offer this feature overnight, which eventually lead me to implementing it on my own resulting in https://llamabudget.com
This self-made solution has quite a few advantages over the bank-native feature, most notably I can connect as many bank accounts as I like. This allows me to have a complete look at my personal finances within seconds. Also, I can track my cash spendings, which the bank of course was not able to do.
Amazing, congrats on building such a tool! I love it :D
Is it free to use (can't find the pricing page)? And also, can it connect to both Canadian and European banks?
Kind of annoying actually - I mostly log into my various accounts to see what each has.
Totaly get it ahah Have you tried other solutions to make this better?
I tried Mint back in the day but haven’t used it in many years. I seem to remember it not being very good after they sold to Intuit.
I use a google sheet for personal finances, but Quickbooks for my business finances. You may also check this website: https://onlykinemasterapk.com/pro3/
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