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

Nick_C

Useful tip re refreshing individual connections from Moneyhub.  Thanks Janusdesign.

Doshwaster

Mickeymacca said:

how is everyone getting on without Moneydashboard?  Found anything that is working for you?  I'm on the YNAB free trial which they've just extended for me so before I commit to that just seeing if there is anything else that does a similar job? thanks

I've settled on MoneyHub. It's not perfect but does some things better than Moneydashboard and I have some hope that they will add new features unlike MDB which had not released any updates in a couple of years.

Retired_Nerd

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread, I have found it very helpful. Like many of you, I was a big fan of the future predicted balance by account based on forecast transactions. I would happily have paid an annual subscription to keep using Money Dashboard, but I have decided to subscribe to Snoop Plus.
Over the last few days I have read multiple reviews & downloaded multiple apps for a trial run. Of those only Buxfer Premium & Snoop Plus came close to fitting the bill.

Buxfer Premium is a US subscription product, but it can be set up to use GBP & the Open Banking connected to all of my UK banks & credit cards. It is primarily web based. It has a mobile app but it is very based & gets terrible reviews. The web/PC version does provide predicted balances, but it looks outdated & feels clunky. It crashed a couple of times while refreshing accounts & each time it initiated an error report, which in turn generated an automated email, but I never received any genuine feedback to queries.

Snoop Plus is pretty much the opposite. The app looks bright & modern, whereas the web/pc version is basic, with limited functionality. The big difference is customer feedback. I couldn't see any way to get a predicted balance, so I emailed them - not expecting a response. I was gobsmacked when they relied within a few hours. This is what they said:

"There are a couple of ways in snoop you can see projected spending and also balances. You can see projected balances through the bill protector, which will look at your expected bills and income vs your current balance and give you a predicted balance. Or alternatively, through the budgeting feature, you can set a target for the month and check your spend including bills vs left to spend. I appreciate neither suggestion is exactly what you are looking for but as you are giving Snoop Plus - it is worth giving the payday cycle a go and you will be able to see the predicted balance in bill protector and if you set an auto budget - you can see how Snoop can help there."

I tried the payday cycle & it sort of works - the main downside is that you only appear to be able to look forward 2 months, for each account. That's fine for me, because I am most interested in the coming month & keeping money in my saving accounts for as long as possible, setting up 'just in time' transfers to make sure that I don't get hit with overdraft or late payment charges.

Snoop Plus seems to be the better product of the two and the annual subscription is less than Buxfer Premium.

Sumof999

ooh interesting @Retired_Nerd thanks for the review sounds interesting... I might have a little look at that before I commit to YNAB.  How much is snoop plus?

rhodium289

I trialed Snoop. Unfortunately it didn't work for my use case where I added accounts for more than one person from a single bank i.e. married couple. Money dashboard allowed this but Snoop reports an error for the first account added once the other parties account is connected. Don't know if this is a known issue or if the root cause is actually multiple parties for a single bank provider but thought I'd share incase this is your use case too.

NorwichMan

I used to use moneyhub and found it okay, until I couldn't connect a new tandem savings account nor a couple of others. Also I really wanted net worth to be accurate to the penny. I have now given up on it.

I am still using YNAB 4, so no monthly charge, and it works great for me. I do have to input transactions manually, which I don't mind (but this is where cross checking total net worth with something like moneyhub would be helpful, if it worked).

Doshwaster

NorwichMan said:

I used to use moneyhub and found it okay, until I couldn't connect a new tandem savings account nor a couple of others. Also I really wanted net worth to be accurate to the penny. I have now given up on it.

I am still using YNAB 4, so no monthly charge, and it works great for me. I do have to input transactions manually, which I don't mind (but this is where cross checking total net worth with something like moneyhub would be helpful, if it worked).

The Net Worth not being shown to the exact penny doesn't bother me. If you are using MoneyHub for property, mortgages, pensions and investments that kind of precision really isn't needed or even knowable. 

I was recently sent a survey from MoneyHub and my feedback was that is was mostly good but, for me, it needs to improve on the reporting, charting and analytics to save having to export the data to Excel. I'm not so bothered about the budget forecasting but everyone's needs and usage is different.

RedDwarf82

I have definitively settled on https://www.gethomebank.org.

- I like the program

- I was able to keep my history from MoneyDashboard since it can import CSV,

- It has required some coding on my part. But investigating Firefly III I discovered Nordigen/GoCardless Bank Account Data which for free allows you to have up to 50 requisitions (bank connections) refreshing as many times as you want per day. Using it and transforming the data to OFX format, you can create a single file to load in Home Bank.

cathybird

Pocketsmith is offering a Black Friday deal, if anyone was thinking of taking a look at them. I'm sure the others are as well though! Just thought I would mention it.

onthego

Thanks for all the reviews.  I’m also trying to replace money dashboard.  Mainly want to track/categorise joint account spending so my other half can easily see (and hopefully rein it in!). We don’t  have investments etc to justify spending a lot on tracking, we need it to cut costs not add to them.  Have not logged on in a full browser as don’t have a PC only phones so apologies if I’ve missed things because of that.

Tried MoneyHub so far, my gripes are: 1. You can’t rename top level categories and Household includes so much (house maintenance, childcare, clothes) and more, so I’ve had to spend hours doing things like putting nursery under Rent category to make the household category meaningful.
2. There are no annual regular payments (we pay several insurances/ utilities etc annually so I created a project called annual bills which is the only way I can list them and check if they’re coming up ) 
3. There seems to be no way to set budget at category level or over multiple categories, only subcategory.  Whereas I want a budget for discretionary spending so if you overspend on one kind of shopping you have to save it back on another.
4. There is no way to list all categories and the budgets currently set up for them so it’s hard to tell if you’ve set a budget up for everything or not, and if a transaction goes in a category with no budget it doesn’t show when you check budgets so you can miss overspend.

What I really want is something that says: you’ve been paid and it looks like you’ve got £4k to spend, but actually X amount is yet to go out this month on bills, you need to keep Y amount for this month’s groceries/fuel etc, you need to keep Z towards the annual bills and that only leaves £300 of which £250 has already been spent on a meal out and car repairs.  

Any ideas on the best app for that please?