Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Manual and Spreadsheet-Based Tracking

  • Many prefer spreadsheets (or simple custom apps mimicking them) for maximum control, privacy, and flexibility.
  • Manual entry is seen as a feature: it adds friction, increases awareness, and curbs impulsive spending.
  • Common patterns:
    • Export CSVs from banks, then categorize and pivot in Excel/Sheets.
    • Daily or weekly manual entry and review, sometimes shared with a partner.
    • Cronjobs or scripts to generate reports or trigger email/SMS/Telegram/ntfy notifications.

Envelope / Zero-Based Budgeting Tools

  • YNAB is widely praised for changing spending habits and stress levels, especially via its rules and envelope approach.
  • Some still use older non-cloud versions or self-hostable clones like Actual Budget and other YNAB-like apps (e.g., Buckets, Moneywell).
  • Critiques: learning curve, subscription cost, and lack of certain features for some workflows.

Mint Replacements and Aggregator Apps

  • After Mint shut down, users migrated to Monarch, Copilot, Quicken Simplifi, LunchMoney, Tiller, and Quicken for Mac.
  • Monarch and Copilot are viewed as solid Mint-like aggregators; some highlight Copilot’s strong UI and subscription handling.
  • LunchMoney is praised for rules, multi-currency, API, and responsive development, but lacks native mobile apps for some; bank coverage can be an issue.
  • Tiller bridges automation with spreadsheets by feeding data into Sheets/Excel.

Plaintext / FOSS Accounting

  • Plaintext accounting (hledger, ledger-cli, beancount, etc.) attracts users who value files over apps, double-entry rigor, and powerful reporting.
  • Challenges include file organization and naming consistency.
  • GnuCash looks powerful but is reported as daunting or confusing by some.

Privacy, Integrations, and Plaid

  • Some avoid aggregators entirely due to distrust of Plaid/Yodlee-style access, preferring CSV exports.
  • Others note integrations are improving when banks support OAuth or read-only access, but many banks still require full credentials.

Categorization, Granularity, and Automation

  • Categorizing transactions is seen as the most tedious part; current tools use heuristics, not LLMs (with a few experiments mentioned).
  • Many want finer-grained insight (e.g., item-level breakdown of Amazon/costco receipts via OCR and linkage to transactions), which participants say doesn’t really exist yet for consumers.

Budgeting Philosophy and Behavior

  • Some argue tracking after spending is “too late” and advocate budgeting first, allocating pay on arrival.
  • Others, especially high earners, see less need for strict budgets and focus on broad tracking or net-worth projections (Projection Lab, simple trackers).
  • Several tools and even a (now-defunct) card concept try to constrain spending in real time or signal when daily/discretionary targets are exceeded.