Home finance & budget software program

One_more_thing

Hi all,

I've just started sorting out my finances on excel but find it a bit of a pain logging into different bank accounts/savings/mortgage etc and updating everything. I'm also rubbish with creating formulas. Is there anything out there that will do this all for me (other than having an accountant)?

I used to use Money, but think that doesn't work any more.

Thanks in advance.

Vortigern

Microsoft Money is still working, although unsupported.

colsten

There is nothing that reliably logs into all UK accounts - and even if it did, you still have to manually sort your budgeting, verify the transactions and do things like assigning categories. Many banks offer downloads of transactions that you can then import into a personal finance package.

Accountunity logs into a fair number of UK banks and Building Societies.

You can use MS Money or similar to do your budgeting and monitoring. I use AceMoney myself. There is also MoneyDashboard (which I found painfully slow and cumbersome), or BankTree (which I would probably now use if I started from scratch).

getmore4less

Go back to MSMoney still the best tool out there and free and safe.

You should be able to automate most inputs and just make the minor adjustments(date&amount) to reconcile the accounts.

Around an hour a month max to do all the regular bills and outgoings and reconcile all the accounts, a bit longer if you want to do some analysis at the same time

depending on how much detail/analysis you want to do of your outgoings the real spends like shopping need splitting into categories anyway so that can add a bit of time if you go into real detail like track how much you spend on particular items like Meat readymeals ...

Not having the account download automated is good because it makes you look at the real data and can spot the anomalies easier and monitor the budget much more closely.