Budgeting Software

pjohnstone · 8 July 2018 at 8:35AM

Hi all, this is my first post here.

What budgeting/financial software do people use? I've been using numbers (mac version of excel) but I'm finding it fairly laborious. Ideally what I would like is a function to view future known cash flow (i.e. bills, direct debits etc) in a bank statement format. Does this make sense? Is such a thing available? I created my on spreadsheet which works really well for me to visualise and plan spending but need something more automated.

Also the ability to import bank statements would be useful.

Thank you all,

Paul

Lomcevak · 8 July 2018 at 11:20AM

I use YNAB (you need a budget) to do this - I'm fully "buffered" in YNAB-speak, which means i'm budgeting income received the previous month and therefore know exactly what I have to spend, and I then use (future-dated) scheduled transactions to project forward all the fixed outgoings (bills, mortgage, etc.) for the coming month to see what my cash flow looks like.Variable outgoings (e.g. groceries and discretionary spending) get budgeted as normal and entered as they happen. Works very well for me, and the result is something very similar to what it sounds like you're looking for.

I'm using YNAB 4 (aka YNAB classic), unfortunately I don't believe this is possible with the newer online version - it's one of the reasons I haven't switched over yet. I've not used the online version though, so maybe someone else who does use it can correct me.

tempus_fugit · 8 July 2018 at 11:49AM

Lomcevak wrote: »

I use YNAB (you need a budget) to do this - I'm fully "buffered" in YNAB-speak, which means i'm budgeting income received the previous month and therefore know exactly what I have to spend, and I then use (future-dated) scheduled transactions to project forward all the fixed outgoings (bills, mortgage, etc.) for the coming month to see what my cash flow looks like.Variable outgoings (e.g. groceries and discretionary spending) get budgeted as normal and entered as they happen. Works very well for me, and the result is something very similar to what it sounds like you're looking for.

I'm using YNAB 4 (aka YNAB classic), unfortunately I don't believe this is possible with the newer online version - it's one of the reasons I haven't switched over yet. I've not used the online version though, so maybe someone else who does use it can correct me.

Yes, you are correct. One of the things that the web version of YNAB took away was the ability to enter future transactions and see their effect on the overall picture. You can enter future transactions but they have no effect on balances until the date that they are set for. This is because YNAB does not set itself up as being a forecasting tool, it sticks to budgeting and creating a buffer of at least one month so that you are living on last month's pay and not this month's, as you have said.

I use the new YNAB along with Google Sheets to carry out the forecasting element, which works quite well for me. I need this because we are retired but living largely off of savings at the moment so I need to keep to a strict monthly budget whilst being able to use future effects of our spending to see how things will mean out long term. This might not be what most people need, however, and I would say that YNAB is very good at the budgeting part of the equation.

Lomcevak · 8 July 2018 at 12:46PM

Thanks, that's interesting.

I adopted YNAB in 2010 and it has made me a die-hard budgeter, and at a high level I like the YNAB philosophy of 'not caring' about bank balances - providing you are fully buffered and stick to the budget your balance doesn't really matter, because you are only budgeting money you have and can't go overdrawn.

However, I can't bring myself to follow the purist YNAB approach of having a single current account that contains all "on-budget" funds - my "on-budget" amount is something like £40k (mostly in 'rainy day' categories, not just the buffer!) and is distributed around the usual set of high-interest accounts. Unfortunately that means I need to do some level of cashflow management to make sure I have the 'right' amount of money in each account (not too little, and not too much) - the YNAB4 workflow supports that quite happily via future transactions (even though I agree it's 'forecasting' and not 'budgeting') and losing that is a deal-breaker for me.

Westie983 · 8 July 2018 at 1:38PM

Lomcevak wrote: »

Thanks, that's interesting.

I adopted YNAB in 2010 and it has made me a die-hard budgeter, and at a high level I like the YNAB philosophy of 'not caring' about bank balances - providing you are fully buffered and stick to the budget your balance doesn't really matter, because you are only budgeting money you have and can't go overdrawn.

However, I can't bring myself to follow the purist YNAB approach of having a single current account that contains all "on-budget" funds - my "on-budget" amount is something like £40k (mostly in 'rainy day' categories, not just the buffer!) and is distributed around the usual set of high-interest accounts. Unfortunately that means I need to do some level of cashflow management to make sure I have the 'right' amount of money in each account (not too little, and not too much) - the YNAB4 workflow supports that quite happily via future transactions (even though I agree it's 'forecasting' and not 'budgeting') and losing that is a deal-breaker for me.

I am still on YNAB4 for this same reason, I can enter future payments say for the bills due at the end of the month, and see how much money I will need to put into the different accounts to manage the payments when they are due.

Till I am forced over I am remaining where I am.

Westie983

pjohnstone · 8 July 2018 at 3:46PM

Thanks for the replies, I'll definitely give YNAB a look

Paul

tempus_fugit · 8 July 2018 at 5:14PM

Lomcevak wrote: »

Thanks, that's interesting.

I adopted YNAB in 2010 and it has made me a die-hard budgeter, and at a high level I like the YNAB philosophy of 'not caring' about bank balances - providing you are fully buffered and stick to the budget your balance doesn't really matter, because you are only budgeting money you have and can't go overdrawn.

However, I can't bring myself to follow the purist YNAB approach of having a single current account that contains all "on-budget" funds - my "on-budget" amount is something like £40k (mostly in 'rainy day' categories, not just the buffer!) and is distributed around the usual set of high-interest accounts. Unfortunately that means I need to do some level of cashflow management to make sure I have the 'right' amount of money in each account (not too little, and not too much) - the YNAB4 workflow supports that quite happily via future transactions (even though I agree it's 'forecasting' and not 'budgeting') and losing that is a deal-breaker for me.

Yes, that's the case for me too. I have a spreadsheet which shows what is in each account as otherwise it would get very messy. But YNAB is used to drive the budget and keep track of what everything is allocated to, with the spreadsheet keeping track of what is in each account.

I do agree that the way YNAB4 worked had its advantages, and the way the new version handles future transactions is the main gripe, but I only had YNAB4 for a few months before the new version came out, and I transferred over before the ways of the older version became habitual for me.

Zero_Sum · 8 July 2018 at 7:06PM

I use MS Money. They've stopped doing it now & my version is about 20 year old but does a really good job

Frogletina · 9 July 2018 at 3:21AM

Westie983 wrote: »

I am still on YNAB4 for this same reason, I can enter future payments say for the bills due at the end of the month, and see how much money I will need to put into the different accounts to manage the payments when they are due.

Till I am forced over I am remaining where I am.

Westie983

I'm about to go on holiday so I've entered all of my future payments and made adjustments to ensure that the accounts will have the right amount in them while I am away.

I've also tried to ensure that they will have the maximum balance in them to get the most interest, but might not be able to achieve that, one will be £400 short for a few days and another will be over the max balance later on, but I might do a couple of online transfers on holiday.

frogletina

getmore4less · 9 July 2018 at 5:20AM

MSMoney is probably still the best feature full tool and is free.

Development stopped because it did everything anyone could need for personal finance.

This does means it is not integrated into the modern world of apps and mobiles.

In some way this is good because budgeting is all about the planning* and once you are doing it properly you don't need the instant access to track.
Most entries can be automated and the focused update to the data set of the rest keeps the eye on the bigger picture.

The budgeting, forecasting and reporting tools built into MSMoney are great once you put in the time to set up the accounts and categories.

*
Budgets are the plan, you should have a min forward view time frame of at least a year in detail allocating the income to the categories.

Your plan should look further forward for any needs that need longer term view like new cars, house moves and even as far as retirement where you need to be putting aside cash for these

Once you have the plan of where you want to allocate your money you can look at the cashflow to see when some of those spends can happen.

Malchester · 9 July 2018 at 6:44AM

Agree about MSMoney. Have used it for many years. Have dabbled with lots of other software but not found anything that comes anywhere close to MSMoney. You can still download it free. I also use spreadsheets for cash flow and for keeping track of when fixed term accounts mature and what I will do with the cash at maturity. Also have spreadsheet for future year forecasting up to probable retirement date and beyond. A bit of a geek I know but I enjoy the challenge of spreadsheets and statistics

Budgeting Software

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