CFcfiggers·Jan 6, 2025
Here's my opinion: there's actually two very different use cases here. Most apps I've tried do not distinguish between the two and that, for me, is their downfall.
Sometimes, you're in the moment trying to make a decision about whether or how much to spend. Call that use 1. And sometimes you're looking back at your spending history needing to make some sense of what has already happened. Call that use 2.
For use 1, I have started using Paktol[0], a weirdly-named phone app made by the guys who created ClojureDart[1] (and written in that Clojure dialect). It's extremely simple, and that's the point. You set a target amount of discretionary spending each day, and it tells you how much you have left or whether you're "overdrawn" for the day. That's it. There's no categories, no analytics, nothing like that. You just plug in every expense that
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's discretionary and it tells you if you're on track. It's so simple it almost annoys me that it's paid. But it's working and no other money tracking app I've ever tried has. It has already paid for itself in better decision-making on my part for having it, so I actually can't complain.
For the second function, I'm just using Excel. I have my own cobbled-together categorization system that's working well enough, and aside from having to go download transactions manually from my different accounts because they don't have an API, the bulk of the categorization work for new entries is automatic (Power Query is very cool).
Part of me wonders what an all-in-one solution could look like and I daydream for ten minutes about making one myself. But that never lasts more than a minute or two. There's a reason so many have tried and failed. I'm not smarter than any of the hundreds of people who have already tried and only partly succeeded.
[0] https://paktol.t10s.com/
[1] https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart