Home budget/finance software

maf20

Just about losing the will to live with this one.

Years back, I was all over our home budgeting and finances.  I had a spreadsheet set up and used to manually update it each month.  Then, for years, we used MyMoneyDashboard.  It was great, but sadly went out of business.  Since then, I've tried numerous apps and platforms, all of which either have something missing or don't work quite in the way we need it to. 

Whilst I'm ok at excel, I've just spent all day trying to set up something at least semi-automated, and I've thrown in the towel.

What we need

* Links into bank/credit cards
* Can set annual budgets (not monthly)
* Tracks spending against these budgets

Happy to pay for something to make our lives easier, but just can't seem to find something that works for us

Anyone got any pointers? 
 

Peter999_2

I have used Firefly III myself for about a year.  It's open source, free and can be used to automatically import transactions from your bank.   I don't use it like that myself, I manually input every transaction as I find I keep on top of my finance that way and nothing gets paid without me knowing about it.

On a night I log into Firefly III on my laptop and enter the transactions for that day (there is an android app for it as well so I can update it when out and about but I often forget, haha).   I also put all the money to come out in the month into a seperate Money Coming Out account.   As the month progresses and I actual pay the money in real life, I then move it from Money Coming Out into which bank account it comes out of.    Therefore I know at the beginning of the month exactly how much money I've either made or lost from the 1st day of the month.

The only thing with it is that it's a bit complicated to setup and needs to be installed on a server (or as a docker container).   I just asked CoPilot AI for a guide and it helped me install it in about 20 minutes.

I too used to use Microsoft Money and then I bought Quicken 2017 until Intuit made it near impossible to use.   I find Firefly III is far better than both of them.