Personal finance software with strong auto sync/tagging

ThePants999

Hi folks,

I've been a YNAB user for a long time, but my financial situation is such that I don't need to do envelope budgeting, I just need to be able to keep an eye on spending - get answers to questions like "what's my monthly average spend on takeaways over the last six months" or "how much have my grocery bills gone up during lockdown". Most importantly, I want to do this with a minimum of effort. YNAB fails because it has no auto sync with my bank accounts, so I have to manually import transactions, and then while it has a go at automatically categorising them, it's pretty dumb - just applies the same category as the last transaction to the same payee. (My employer obviously pays me a salary, but also has a direct debit to charge me my canteen bill, which comes out at a very different time of the month - so every damn month, I import the direct debit and YNAB thinks it's negative salary and I have to recategorise it to canteen bill, and then I import my salary and YNAB thinks it's a huge refund on my canteen bill and I have to recategorise it to salary. Sigh.) Another important feature is having a mobile app so my wife can input cash transactions, she still does a pretty diverse range of those.

Buxfer looks promising - I particularly like the look of "rules" for tagging, which will fix issues like that salary/canteen one. Any experiences with that? Other suggestions?

ThePants999

Quick bump...

BritPop

If you want to stick with YNAB, have a look at https://syncforynab.com which will use open banking to auto import everything into YNAB automatically. It costs extra as it's a third party service but it works very very well.

If you just want to track spending you could use an app on your computer like MS Money, Moneydance, Banktivity etc where you download your transactions and then categorise them yourself. Some of these apps sync to mobile. Or you could even use a spreadsheet and CSV file. Depends what you want to do with the data.

Alternatively, you could use a bank account which allows you to categories your transactions. I think Monzo is probably the best at doing this, but I believe Natwest and Barclays mobile apps have this option too.

Hope that helps a little.