Personal Finance

What software do you use for keeping track of your finances?

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  • Jan 11th, 2013 3:50 pm
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Deal Guru
Aug 14, 2007
12807 posts
3837 upvotes
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What software do you use for keeping track of your finances?

I've been looking to get an application to track my finances and budgets.

Some people are suggesting Microsoft money (or whatever it's called) however it is discontinued.

I saw another program called You Need A Budget (YNAP) for $60 but I will try the 30 day trial first...

Excel I could use however I haven't made up a spreadsheet in years so it wouldn't be that good.

Any other suggestions for an application preferably free?
41 replies
Member
May 25, 2006
301 posts
24 upvotes
I just use excel. Mind you I work in finance so I do spreadsheets all day every day.
Banned
Jul 26, 2009
4315 posts
663 upvotes
Toronto
I use mint for android. Very useful, I think they have mint for PC as well.
https://www.mint.com/canada/

It is given read only access to your accounts, and it pretty much creates budgets for you based on your first month's spending, then you can tweak it from there.

It gives alerts when overbudget, or when you get charged fees by your bank/credit card.

And before someone says its unsafe, I use it, millions of others use it on Android/iOS, so far no report of anyone getting their account hacked... yet
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Newbie
Sep 13, 2012
77 posts
33 upvotes
MISSISSAUGA
+1
zijin_cheng wrote: I use mint for android. Very useful, I think they have mint for PC as well.
https://www.mint.com/canada/

It is given read only access to your accounts, and it pretty much creates budgets for you based on your first month's spending, then you can tweak it from there.

It gives alerts when overbudget, or when you get charged fees by your bank/credit card.

And before someone says its unsafe, I use it, millions of others use it on Android/iOS, so far no report of anyone getting their account hacked... yet
Sr. Member
User avatar
Aug 22, 2009
589 posts
151 upvotes
Guelph, ON
I'm an advanced spreadsheet user (use it every day at work as well), but I don't use Excel for tracking personal finances. Personal finance software isn't expensive and well worth the money IMO. I use Quicken (been using it for about 5 years) and although it has its quirks, it does the job well. Mint looks really good, but I'm not comfortable with giving my banking passwords to a third-party company.
Member
Feb 7, 2012
331 posts
43 upvotes
Toronto
I used to use spreadsheets and my head. I recently switched to GnuCash -- useable FOSS that takes care of a lot of the nitty-gritty for you. Not the prettiest interface in the world, but I value functionality over lip gloss.
Deal Addict
Aug 14, 2007
2434 posts
328 upvotes
Waterloo
I really like mint, but unfortunately they do not support my primary credit card (CUETS) so is useless to me.
I am actually thinking of switching my primary card so that I can use mint... Only reason I am using my current CC is because I have been using it for last 10 years.. it is actually a pretty crappy card.
Sr. Member
Jun 9, 2006
836 posts
85 upvotes
Thornhill
I'm in the same boat, hopefully I can take some suggestions here!

I am trying YNAB and I don't understand how it is supposed to work. Basically, my confusion comes from the fact that you are supposed to allocate all your income to a job. I understand this, what I don't understand is, you are supposed to allocate dollars that you are expected to receive as well as money you have allocated for this month (January). So, I am saying that I start off with $0 and I will just be allocating money from my pay for January. Well, it says I'm overbudget because I am using money I don't have yet. Great... It gives you 34 days trial, but I don't think that is sufficient to see what it can do for me.

I have looked at Microsoft Money. It works fine even though it is discontinued. The only big feature that it doesn't do is that it doesn't automatically download market prices for stocks, mutual funds, etc. You need to manually enter those in. If you are fine with that, it works great and it is free. But nowadays, most people want a way to do things on their phone which Money cannot do.

Excel is great if you know what you are doing, but fails if you don't. I have a year's worth of data in my Excel but I have no idea what to do with it, lol.
Deal Fanatic
Oct 7, 2007
9404 posts
5374 upvotes
I use Quicken Home & Business and have been using Quicken for a number of years. I originally started using it to track my spend but have found over the years that it has saved me money in other ways also. For example, I use it to reconcile my credit card statements. Once in a while, this has helped me catch an unauthorized charge to my card. I have also used it to look back on something that may have been covered by warranty such that I could take advantage of the warranty. Also, I have been able to compare expenses year over year and identify when something is way out of whack. Just last month I noticed my electricity bill to 50% higher than what it was for the same period last year. This also allowed me to follow up with confidence with the hydro company only to find out that it was a meter reader error. I am totally biased (and an advanced spreadsheet user) but I believe Quicken will pay for itself in no time and is well worth the investment.
Deal Expert
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Nov 2, 2003
17117 posts
3872 upvotes
GTA
I use something called Microsoft Excel. It's a spreadsheet application with cells that allows you to perform calculations using formulas and if you're really advanced scripts.
Deal Addict
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Jun 25, 2008
1122 posts
1174 upvotes
I use MS Money. It was free and I don't care that it's discontinued as it does everything I need it to do. I have it auto-backup to my online cloud storage and I have a remote desktop utility for my iPad so I can use it from there too.
Deal Addict
User avatar
Sep 4, 2005
4118 posts
2270 upvotes
Toronto
Waiwai wrote: I'm in the same boat, hopefully I can take some suggestions here!

I am trying YNAB and I don't understand how it is supposed to work. Basically, my confusion comes from the fact that you are supposed to allocate all your income to a job. I understand this, what I don't understand is, you are supposed to allocate dollars that you are expected to receive as well as money you have allocated for this month (January). So, I am saying that I start off with $0 and I will just be allocating money from my pay for January. Well, it says I'm overbudget because I am using money I don't have yet. Great... It gives you 34 days trial, but I don't think that is sufficient to see what it can do for me.

I have looked at Microsoft Money. It works fine even though it is discontinued. The only big feature that it doesn't do is that it doesn't automatically download market prices for stocks, mutual funds, etc. You need to manually enter those in. If you are fine with that, it works great and it is free. But nowadays, most people want a way to do things on their phone which Money cannot do.

Excel is great if you know what you are doing, but fails if you don't. I have a year's worth of data in my Excel but I have no idea what to do with it, lol.
YNAB is perfect for people with cc debt, or those who can't stay afloat. I tried it as a way to kinda cut back my unusual spending but that's not it's main function.

It works by getting you to input your income, then it forces you to allocate every dollar of that income to something upcoming (and then the rest goes to your past debt). By doing this you trim off some of the excessive spending you may be doing while seeing where your money goes. Then after a while *poof* idealy you end of using the income from one month to essentially "future pay" next months bills. So when the bills come you can afford to pay them off as you have the money there. Then the last step after getting you a month ahead is to get you saving/investing the rest.


I'm using an excessively detailed excel spread sheet. For those using excel can you go in depth with what you are doing on yours (recording, analyzing etc).

I have a worksheet for each savings account at each institution. It shows funds in, funds out, balance, and a tally of the interest rate. For the accounts I use more than once a month or two, I've created macro's to populate the data from the .csv pulls I do from my banks. (president's choice, people's trust, td e-series).

The mutual fund tracker I'm currently using for my e-series is one I can use to see how much I've contributed and what it's running at. I've got a macro half done for importing the market data from TD. This is more so I can look back in a few years and see how I've done overall. Reading threads where people say I've had mutual funds for 5/10/30 years and have no clue how they performed made me uneasy.

I've also got a consolidated worksheet to show my overall "worth" (how much loot I'd drop if killed. Or if I desired to liquidate it all and flee to an island somewhere warm :D ).
Member
May 25, 2006
301 posts
24 upvotes
Anonymouse wrote: Excel is great for primitive analysis, but it doesn't hold a candle to what a purpose-built program with an underlying database architecture can do.
You would be surprised what is possible in excel. I have basically recreated an entire ERP system for myself in excel. It lacks a bit to the elogance a premade program has but none of the power and trumps almost anything in customization. Also I just find making advanced excel sheets fun cause I'm crazy in the head.
Deal Addict
Jun 10, 2008
1206 posts
392 upvotes
Mint.com .... will probably switch to excel if a lot of wealth accumulates in my accounts, lol, and I can consolidate everything to the minimum number of accounts, coz I probably won;t care about all those signup bonuses once I am wealthy and then I hopefully have to download transactions from only one or two sources to feed into excel.
Member
May 9, 2002
268 posts
33 upvotes
Anonymouse wrote: It isn't perfect, but I use Quicken 2012. Very powerful charting and reporting functions. Just put everything on plastic and every single transaction will be recorded so you can analyze it later.

Just don't yell at your wife about the $180 hair salon charges; I made that mistake.
lol $180? You're getting off cheap :lol:

+1 Quicken. They have a bad rep, crap support, and a horrible sales model (forcing upgrades every 3 years), but it does what it does, and does it well. You will often see it on sale here on RFD for $40-50. I have used Quicken since 1999 when I started working for the first time, and it has held up for my needs from a wild teenager to a married homeowner with RRSPs. I use debit/cc for 99.999% of my purchases to keep an accurate history (and accumulate reward points, of course.) Plus, my wife likes to tell people that I can give them an exact figure of how much I spent on something as trivial as slurpees, in any given summer between 1999 and now.

Regarding Excel - there is no doubt it is an extremely powerful app for people that know how to use it. I am intermediate at best when it comes to using Excel's functionality. But for the other 99% of us (maybe 97% of RFDers), we need an app that is polished and gives us shiny reports and pie charts just by clicking the one that says "How much did groceries cost this month vs last month". For that, Money/Quicken/YNAB are all viable options.

edit: OP should have made this thread a poll..
Deal Addict
User avatar
Dec 26, 2010
1736 posts
776 upvotes
Calgary
I use Google Spreadsheets, which function just like excel. You can do a lot, granted you have to learn how to do the more advanced, but once you have the sheets made the way you like it's awesome.
Deal Guru
Aug 14, 2007
12807 posts
3837 upvotes
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Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

To those using mint all I have to say is you're taking a pretty large risk if anything happens to your account. I'll never use it...
Deal Fanatic
User avatar
Sep 13, 2004
5148 posts
1070 upvotes
I use MoneyWise for android you can extract to excel with ease and it does everything you need it to.
"The first rule of RFD is, you do not talk about RFD."

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