[mitul_45]

Not a freelancer, but I wanted to track my everyday finances since long. I tried lot of different tools but in the end ended up using simple Google sheet with some formulas.

The only issue with this approach is – adding expenses is pain. When I am shopping for something, opening Google Sheet (on phone) and adding an expense/income is too cumbersome. So I built a UI for it – https://github.com/mitul45/expense-manager.

I have been using it since last couple of years and have an idea of my monthly/weekly expenses.

[sridca]

I use Google Sheets as well to track stuff like finances, calories, workout stats. And I too have wondered about a nicer way of inputting data.

Have you looked into Google Forms? I really wish it supported custom types like list of items from named ranges. A custom UI app (in Haskell/reflex!) is what I may end up writing too.

[war1025]

I use ledger myself, but the issue I always run into is my wife is much less likely to keep track of what she buys and let me know so I can record it. Where that gets especially tricky is when she goes someplace and leaves a tip. Resolving tips is a real pain in the butt, especially since it comes through in the checking account at the original price and is then later processed at the tip-included price. Matching those up is a real bear.

[mitul_45]

I also had a similar issue, but then it became like a habit – every night I would check my accounts and add day's expenses (it's difficult if you have a lot of cash transactions). For the tip, wouldn't you round off to nearest full digit? You can just add that as an expense.

[war1025]

I used to reconcile our purchases against our online checking account every night, but the issue with tips happened when I would do that but then a few weeks later I would go through and actually balance everything out and suddenly I'd be off by a dollar and change and have to go on a deep dive to find out where I went wrong.