[dave333]

I guess it's obvious that a plain spreadsheet does this job nicely. I use one row per day and one column for each account, e.g. rent, utilities, each credit card, savings accts etc. I make a new tab each year. Very easy to see in advance the low point in your bank balance each month/pay period.

[jgalvez]

Just wanted to give 2 cents on the rationale behind this:

Most people don't budget at all.

Most people live paycheck to paycheck. I have lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time. When your finances are in distress, and you have no planning, the least helpful thing you can do is trying a fully featured app, or even worse, a spreadsheet. It requires a lot of attention to details and they can get overwhelming and confusing to manage — not everyone is fluent in spreadsheet formulas, as basic as they may be, to the point of getting the setup right, and most template spreadsheets available pack a lot of unnecessary things and customizing them becomes a project of its own. There's also the feeling of despair realizing you're not even close to even having that much data or assets to put in. This is not only my opinion — this is what I've gathered asking friends and family on the topic.

So this is a way to keep things simple. Extremely simple. No integration to banks, no mental overhead, just a smart replacement for a piece of paper where you write down your income and your expenses. There is a lot of people that still use a physical notebook to keep track of their finances, in this day and age, out of sheer choice — it's a way to maintain focus on the big picture, and not miss any detail.

It's a way to express your finances in a portable, human-readable format that is essentially computable plain text. You can express your finances at a 10,000-feet level, know what your savings will look like, for motivation, and know where your money is going. This is it. Surely it will be too simple for many, but perhaps just about right for some.

You're also not vendor locked, your data is plain text and you can use the CLI (free and open source) to process it. I myself use the CLI and manage my sheets from Sublime Text. Yep :)

[em-bee]

the first level of budgeting is to track your expenses against your income. you look at whether your bank account is growing or not.

then you categorize expenses to get an understanding of your spending.

only after you have those categories, you can start to budget.

you can look at the categories and consider whether you are spending to much on a category or not.

if your cash flow is negative you need to find categories that you can reduce. likewise if you want to save money for future events.

i'd like an expense tracker that helps me categorize my expenses. your app seems useful only after i have done that.

the workflow i am looking for is:

i enter expenses as i make them, one line at a time. including breaking out groceries into individual items. then it should allow me to group items into categories. tracking which items don't have a group yet. finally it should tell me how much i am spending per group each month.

[mrngm]

I'm not sure that level of detail (specifying receipts to the article level) helps you get a grasp of your overall spending, nor do I expect it giving the "right advice". Suppose you buy a lot of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, would you want that tool to suggest you reduce that spending?

[em-bee]

the point is to group articles by category. a single visit to a supermarket may contain important and vanity items mixed together. i want to break that out and then categorize accordingly. i do want to know how much i am spending on candy or sugar drinks, or, if you are so inclined, cigarettes or alcohol. toys, gifts, school supplies are all different categories that are worth tracking. if you go shopping at places like target or walmart you'll get all of that mixed up on a single receipt.

fruits and vegetables don't need their own category. they could be grouped into food but candy bars or soda are not food.

i don't want the tool to suggest anything, but i want the numbers so i can draw my own conclusions.

entering data by article is easier than categorizing on the spot. i could just scan the receipt and let the tool work out the categories (once i assigned a category to an item, the tool can do it for any repeat appearance)

[mrngm]

I suppose a tool like Beancount (or (h)ledger, but I only have experience with beancount) and bean-web would fulfill your needs. The latter offers HTML reports per arbitrary subaccount, based on the data entered in the beancount file (which is plain text).

[dave333]

Fair enough and I can see how this will help people a lot. I was just pushing what has worked well for me.