Personal Finance apps (was: Money Dashboard apps closing down)

SamDude

Initial thoughts on Spendee (Premium trial):

• It has Categories that you can edit, but not subcategories (e.g. Car > parking/fuel/servicing). Only way around this is to create all the categories at the top-level which will make it very busy to use and navigate.
• There is no 'all transactions' view on the web view - you need to view transactions for each account individually, or navigate by category or other filters. On the iPhone app you can see a 'Timeline' of all transactions...
• Can't delete or split transactions.

It has a nice web UI and feels similar to Wallet (but with fewer features, like subcategories)

janusdesign

i'm slowly warming to Moneyhub - spent the morning adding connections and they all worked apart (apart from 1 building society) - including a few that were broken with MD... nice to see Chase available (though obviously had to add using the app version rather than desktop as it needs to connect to the Chase app).

weirdly, it assigned accounts from RCi and Saffron to "Current accounts" rather than savings - you can't change that manually yourself, you need to contact support for them to do it.

I sent them an email and got a reply with 7 minutes...

Thank you for your message.
 
We can't make this change at our end however I can ask our third party partner if this is possible at their end.
 
I will escalate this issue now and revert back to you when we have an update.

one feature I wasn't expecting to see is that you can use Moneyhub to transfer money between accounts - haven't tried it yet though.

The payments feature uses Open Banking payments, which is regulated by the FCA and is one of the safest forms of payments, as each payment requires you to perform strong customer authentication. Moneyhub doesn’t collect your banking credentials and can't make a payment on your behalf, we securely communicate with your bank to tell them what payment you want to make and then redirect you to your bank to authorise that payment.

When you request to make a payment in Moneyhub, you will be then transferred to your banking provider's website or app to authorise that transaction. Neither Moneyhub nor another individual can make payments on your behalf via Moneyhub

If your account isn't a current account or is manually connected, as long as the account has a sort code and account number, you can make payments to these accounts using the Add contact option. This option is an excellent way to;

• Pay friends or family

• Pay into an account that is not connected via Open Banking such as pensions or savings.

Sumof999

I signed up to Moneyhub today too but am really missing the function that Moneydashboard has where it takes your scheduled spending and deducts budgets and lets you know what is left over or not!).  Can't find a way to make Moneyhub do that.  I did manage to connect all accounts though.  I also have signed up for the free YNAB trial.  I used to have it a few years ago and it was amazing but I didn't like the hike in cost... I feel like I'll be dropping a TV subscription in order to have it though....  So gutted about Moneydashboard

Unfriended

ClaraSolis said:

Is there any app/web version that has a decent planner like Money Dashboard's?


I need a visual aid to help me with our budgeting, where I can see what will be coming in and going out for all accounts. I don't do well if I can't see a clear overview.
I liked that I could put in recurring predictions with MD on specific days. I've just tried Moneyhub and it doesn't seem to let you put in anything as detailed.

Totally agree.  I pretty much worked out my entire retirement plan using that screen. 

I've also been trying Moneyhub and although I do quite like it overall (it's my frontrunner so far), the planner seems completely useless. I'm really going to miss MD Classic's big clear planner and balance history screens.

BTW A big thanks to everyone here who is feeding back their experiences with the alternatives, much appreciated

kirkie_2

In Moneyhub is there a way to rename more than one transaction name at once?

For example, if I searched Tesco and I had 20 transactions, can I rename one transaction and then tick all the others so it renames them all?

You could do this in Money Dashboard and you can also do this in Emma. 

RedDwarf82

It would seem people are gravitating towards MoneyHub.

FWIW it has also been discussed in https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/16yoyxp/money_dashboard_closing_alternatives/

Some people seem to have decided they don't want to move to a service that may close in the future, so are moving to local/self-hosted alternatives

-http://homebank.free.fr/help/index.html

Local app. It seems to offer everything, including automatic categorization, except Open Banking. So you still need to log in into your bank and download the transactions to import them into the app.

- https://www.firefly-iii.org/

Quite interesting project. And it offers automatic transaction importing via https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/faq/spectre-and-nordigen/

- https://actualbudget.com/

Which seems to be in a weird moment right now -> https://actualbudget.com/open-source

Unpensioned56

It's gutting, I used it weekly on the app, but I can see it wasn't generating any income! I've installed snoop but the free version only allows 2 custom categories and it feels a bit naggy. Think I'll try moneyhub. I'm happy using my own spreadsheet for an oversight of everything, but I like an app to analyse my current account spending.

emsiewill

The main selling point of MD for me was the planner, really a deal breaker to be honest.  I've signed up for a quarter of Pocketsmith at £34.99 (lowest priced version - I don't need to add more than 6 banks so it works for me at that level), it is definitely one of the most expensive out there, but I am finding it really good so far.  The "budget" section is pretty much the same as the planner was on MD - a calendar and a graph view.  You can select transactions and rename / recategorise in bulk, set up your own categories etc etc.  I'm definitely sold so far.

One thing it does which MD didn't do is connect to Chase, although it's a bit fiddly as it needs to be authorised every time you sync.  You have to do it via the browser on your phone (ie log into Pocketsmith on your phone) as it needs to authorise via the app.  That isn't a big deal for me, as my Chase account isn't my main account, so I don't need to sync it all the time.

Hopefully by the end of my first quarter I will have worked out whether it's worth the cost - at the moment, I'm feeling it definitely will.

ClaraSolis

emsiewill said:

The main selling point of MD for me was the planner, really a deal breaker to be honest.  I've signed up for a quarter of Pocketsmith at £34.99 (lowest priced version - I don't need to add more than 6 banks so it works for me at that level), it is definitely one of the most expensive out there, but I am finding it really good so far.  The "budget" section is pretty much the same as the planner was on MD - a calendar and a graph view.  You can select transactions and rename / recategorise in bulk, set up your own categories etc etc.  I'm definitely sold so far.

One thing it does which MD didn't do is connect to Chase, although it's a bit fiddly as it needs to be authorised every time you sync.  You have to do it via the browser on your phone (ie log into Pocketsmith on your phone) as it needs to authorise via the app.  That isn't a big deal for me, as my Chase account isn't my main account, so I don't need to sync it all the time.

Hopefully by the end of my first quarter I will have worked out whether it's worth the cost - at the moment, I'm feeling it definitely will.

Would you be able to post a screenshot of what the planner looks like please (feel free to blur out any details of course!)?  

It's the main feature I'm looking for, and I haven't been able to find it yet in some of the other alternatives I've tried. I really need a graph that can show me what's coming in and out on certain days to help me with my budget planning.

1spiral

I have sort of settled for Lumio because it gives me the ability to share data with my partner. What I can't seem to do is easily spot when an account was last refreshed without drilling down 1 account at a time. It also doesn't say how long ago that was which MD did, only the date refreshed. There seems to be a refresh button but pressing it just tells me that it was last updated at the current time without actually refreshing the data. I currently have a situation where I moved some money from account a to b and it is visible in both accounts on the app without being able to refresh it. Being able to manually refresh was useful in MT.