Ask HN: Are Personal Finance Apps Falling Short for Anyone Else?
Hi! I hope this is the right forum for this.
Lately, I've been looking into personal finance apps, hoping to find something that could help me manage my finances and plan for the future. Despite there being so many apps designed to do this, I find myself continually reverting an Excel spreadsheet.
It seems like these apps should be making financial management easier, but in my experience—and from what I've gathered from doing a bit of research online (reddit and HN) others people find they often don't meet all our needs.
This has left me wondering, do they just not work?
Has anyone else here experienced similar frustrations? I'm curious to hear your experiences with finance apps (or do you just use a spreadsheet?) What specific features or issues have made you stick with or abandon these tools? Do you think these apps lack certain functionalities, or is it something else entirely?
I’d appreciate any insights or recommendations for alternatives that might be worth exploring.
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!
You Need a Budget (YNAB) has worked great for me for about 8 years now. The budgeting concept is a little different (proactive instead of reactive financial planning), but once you wrap your head around the concept, it's so liberating.
Are there some quirks with the app? Sure. But it's very feature rich and does everything I need it to do.
That sounds great, happy it's worked for you. I've heard a lot about YNAB while i've been researching. It may be something i'll have to give a trial.
In my experience with occasional / sporadic deep dives into this space, the big problem is with the data/integration.
At best, you can mostly get things into OFX files / quickbooks, or CSV / import into something else, but it's always a bit clunky, authentication is a pain, and every bank / provider does it a bit differently because... they don't actually want you to be able to do this yourself, they want you to log into their website and see their ads.
Alternatively, there are things like Mint, Plaid, but they don't stick around long enough, eventually get bought, and also are a channel for ads.
The ledger tool is pretty cool. In the past, I've gotten reasonably far with various tools & scripts to normalize bank file downloads into ledger format, and consolidate all of those into a set of accounts with some basic rules and occiasional hand tweaking.
I definitely agree with you on the data integration side of things. Unless you're a large financial institution trying to get to your bank data through APIs is essentially impossible.
I've been reading up on ledger recently and it does see cool, bit of a learning curve but will deffo look into it more.
Appreciate your response!
I don't have any issues with the one I use. It syncs data in from various sources, lets me categorize the transactions and set budget targets for the categories. When it comes to calculating things like net worth, Excel works just fine for that since I do it like once or twice a year, that needle doesn't move that fast so any automation isn't worth spending money on in my opinion.
You didn't mention any specific features or products or specific frustrations so its hard to provide any recommendations or insights or alternatives.
What are you using at the moment?
And i think the main thing is getting very granular breakdowns, so the only way to do this at the moment would be to scan all of my receipts and process them, not the most robust method) and then also data integration, so being able to pull and analyse my statements (only seems to really be available through open banking apis which individuals cant really access.)
Copilot money seems pretty decent so far. You might also just embrace the spreadsheet and use Tiller to scrape your info into one. At one point I tried to run my finances like a business and use QuickBooks, generating quarterly statements on PnL / balance sheet, that does get a bit tiresome though!
I've not come across tiller before, i will have to take a look at it. And yeah, that was one of my main gripes, there seems to be no quick and easy way to run your finances like a business (as beneficial as this would be for you).