Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for?

29 pointsbeartech35 comments

I started budgeting years ago and I was never able to find an app (or even webapp) capable of doing so for me. Perhaps I didn't search enough.. budgeting apps that come to see this thread in the future, please don't judge me :)

Some of them integrate with your bank account, credit card and I'm not really interested in this sort of stuff. I don't want 3rd party apps having access to whatever my bank produces, not to mention that are hundreds of banks out there and I'd assume that making those integrations are in fact a big deal and possibly dangerous (for a security point of view).

In my specific case, it all started with a local spreadsheet on my laptop, that later became a google forms (I wanted to save new transactions "on the go" and also share it with my wife) and now I'm going to build yet another budgeting app for my needs. Nothing fancy, but just something helpful and makes me proud of.

If you are using a budgeting app already, what's missing?

If you wish to use one, what sort of features would you look for?

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The ability to automatically rename transactions to more friendly names but not break future imports.

* Let me create a payee like "Amazon" and define some rules to map transactions to them. Make sure there's some flexibility. Regex would be nice but probably doesn't have to be that powerful. Things like "AMZN MKTP%" and "AMAZON.COM%".

* Make sure that for all functions in your UI/API/whatever that the transactions are as if they were all to the single payee "Amazon."

* But, and this is the thing that other budget software gets wrong, keep the original transaction around so that when I reimport my transactions they get mapped correctly.

Support payment apps like Venmo/CashApp without having to treat them like this weird account. I get that's how accountants do it but I just want to import my Venmo and link the transactions.

* If I split something with someone then only count the money I spent toward my budget category. Other apps add this as a "credit" to the category which, while works, is silly and gives a distorted picture of my spending. I buy $60 worth of food for friends but I only spend $10 then I want the $50 be its own thing and moved out of the category once linked. I should be able to do this with cash too. Give me the option to hide such transactions since they're not really mine and just noise to my spending.

* Similarly, let me choose how I want joint spending to work. If me and my husband have a joint checking account in addition to our personal accounts and I set a global rule like "keep under $200 for groceries" then allow me to decide whether I want $200 spent from the joint account to count as $200 or $100 (or really any split I suppose).

Make income work less silly than imaginary infinity dollar accounts. Behind the scenes do what you gotta do but make it okay to have money appear from nowhere. I don't want my stimulus check to live in an imaginary "The Fed." Accountants I guess love it but it's just noise to me.

Another one for managing multiple accounts and marriage/roommates. Allow creating account-local, person-local, and global rules and buckets for everything.

Hi! Founder of https://lunchmoney.app here. On the go right now, but really quickly, I've built a Rules engine within the product that does exactly what you're looking for. Also, granular settings for whether a category will be counted towards income, budget and/or totals allows for greater control over organizing your transactions. If you end up checking it out, let me know what you think!

Basically every major budgeting app I've looked at doesn't allow rolling buckets of money. For example, my wife and I budget $X per month for travel, but we only travel once or twice a year. What I'd really like to be able to do is allocate some amount every month to certain activities and have my budget keep track of how much I've saved for that purpose.

On the other side, sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile our food budget between months. If we have a big grocery trip on the last day of the month, we kind of expect to spend less the next month but won't always remember that when we go reconcile our budget.

YNAB does that. It's one of the things that keeps me on it. My wife is going home to Argentina in October for a month, we've started setting aside an amount of money each month to cover her costs while there (she'll be staying with family so this is money to cover meals/drinks out and things she wants to buy there that aren't easy to get here). The amount builds up to our target for this trip.

The same thing for groceries or any other category. If I budget $300/month normally for groceries, but only spend $200 this month, I have $100 leftover for next month. I can choose to budget the full $300 like normal (have a balance of $400 available) or just $200 to bring it up to my target balance.

Mint.com's budget feature let's you choose to roll over money.

Is Mint's budget still based on an estimation of income and not real income/cash-on-hand?

Hi OP, I was in your exact position just over a year ago. I had been using my own spreadsheet for 1.5 years and finally found time to turn it into a web app (backstory at https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money)

The main features I found missing in other budgeting apps that prompted me to make my own were:

- native multicurrency support (I travel a lot and am a digital nomad by lifestyle, so this was quite important to me)

- curtains pulled on the "magic" that some budgeting apps try to add to my transactions

- the ability to split/group transactions so I can see how much I actually spent when I pick up a large bill and friends pay me back

- separate tracking of recurring expenses

- seeing historical spending trends and having information help drive my budget for the next month

I've implemented all of this and more. If you're interested, check it out at https://lunchmoney.app. I'd love to hear what you think.

In terms of what's missing that's not currently on the roadmap:

- rollover budgets

- a savings and/or goals feature

- debt repayment feature

As made evident by this thread, everyone has their own preferred way to budget, and of course there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Looking forward to seeing what you build, if you end up going down that path. Cheers!

Hey jnfr!

Your app is definitely what I envision for mine. Website and all that is absolutely amazing! Congrats!

My app is "similar" in some ways but, of course, in a very small scale at the moment (still in development: live for me, wife and a couple of friends).

This is what I've got so far:

- Web version only

- Multi currency is a must for me too (Brazilian living in Europe here)

- Looking at the screenshots of your app, I also have the "category listing" by percentage. I don't look at it on a daily basis but I think it's important to at least have some control over stuff I'm spending my money with.

- Under the hood, I share the same "account" (but different user credentials) with my wife so we both leverage saving transactions wherever we are, together.

- I've also got historical transactions. It's the only way I found how to identify where my money is going over time.

- No "budgeting" per se: I understand how some folks need to spare X amount of money for "Groceries" or "Travel".. and as some have already pointed out, I don't want to be on day 20th of the month and running out of budget for a specific category and not being able to keep spending if I have to. For a customer point of view, it would bring me "frustration" by simply checking that I'm below budget on the next month. Again, I value that, but I'm fine with my finances.

For now, I'm not sure how I can make money out of it. I'm strongly thinking about simply releasing it, getting feedback and improve along the way. I don't want to be a competitor of yours and I'm more than happy that list your app as an alternative if necessary as soon as I go live!

Again, congratulations. I want to be a solo entrepreneur in the future. I'm not just there yet.

Thanks for your insights and good luck with your product!

Honestly, I need two things: a simple interface that let's me log an expense in a few seconds, and a detailed analysis that I can look at (spendings per weekday, per week, per month; maybe an overview that links similar expenses [food] together so that I can see the frequencies?). If that is well done then I'm mostly set.

> in a few seconds

And in the bare minimum of clicks. Intelligent defaults of cursor placement and number pad.

I've tried a few and cobbling together the best of the best I think it goes something like:

1) take out phone and unlock

2) click on app

3) app opens into entry mode with default category already selected, number pad up and ready to go, and the cursor on the entry. So, all I have to do is enter the price and hit enter.

3) -alt And if I'm entering an non default category it's a click away with large buttons and clear feedback.

4) Close phone

5) put it back in my pocket.

This perfectly describes a Flutter app I made for tracking expenses that me and my SO have been using for the past two years. At first it took some getting used to, but now logging an expense with the correct category takes 2-3 extra secs. We store all this data in Google sheets for easy analysis, and also export to Google BigQuery for easy querying. Having the ability to SQL through all my expenses is just so awesome and powerful

In my opinion budgeting apps conflate accounting with budgeting.

Categorizing bank charges is accounting. Spending money then categorizing expenses is a terrible way to budget in my experience. It’s backwards.

I separate my income into different accounts, then spend from those accounts.

This has many advantages:

- Not possible to overspend.

- Extra money rolls over.

- No time wasted accounting, labeling, reconciling, etc.

- No need to share transaction history or credentials with budgeting apps.

Privacy.com let’s you create virtual credit cards with spending limits. That’s the closest thing to my ideal budgeting app, but the limitation is I can’t withdraw cash.

The app I want is a bank that can easily create multiple accounts and associated debit cards.

Before online shopping this was simple, I just had to take out the cash I needed for the different categories and keep them separate.

Similar to what others are suggesting:

Month-to-month doesn't work.

Mint's budget breakdown totally fails if my Landlord cashes my check too early/late.

Month-to-month doesn't work for expenses that aren't monthly. Example: travel.

Month-to-month doesn't work when the calendar lines up and you get 3 paychecks that month instead of the normal 2.

I'd be curious for a budgeting app that still has the concept of a month, but isn't locked to calendar dates.

Rolling average? Bucketed allotments that roll over? Maybe

The biggest problem with tools like Mint's is that it's not really a budget. It's a way to say "I don't want to spend more than X in a time period" but it says nothing about how much money you have now for spending. YNAB's approach (not unique to them but particularly pushed by them) is much better, where you only budget/allocate money you have. So I send in my check for my water bill, I have the money now. If they don't cash it until next month that's fine, my YNAB budget still has that money marked for that spending. I had the same issue with rent, where I'd pay it at the end of the month, but half the time it was cashed the next month. So every other month I'd spend double what was expected (for the month), and Mint went nuts. YNAB doesn't care.

Goodbudget has quarterly / annual / goal budgets which are good for things like your travel example.

I use YNAB right now. It works pretty well, but I have a few issues:

Multi-currency support requires setting up multiple budgets and switching between them. For a while I needed to track both USD and ARS, but the ARS was for a much smaller amount and limited scope. It was annoying having to switch between the budgets when I was traveling in Argentina, but still had to manage things in the US.

Multi-month view. YNAB4 had it, it was great, YNAB5 dropped it. This let me easily see trends over recent months for the same category, and could budget ahead more easily as I started getting ahead on my money (I liked budgeting ahead more than setting up an emergency fund category, made it clear how far ahead I was, and in the worst case I'd take money from 1-3 months out to use for present day emergencies).

Choice between rolling over funds or releasing them at the end of a time period. If I budget $200 for groceries and only use $150, in YNAB it automatically makes that $50 extra available the next month. I want that. But that's not always the case, I'd like the option of releasing the funds at the end of the budget period. Let's say I budget $500 for a trip, and only spend $400, that extra $100 would be better served (for me) freed up and applied to another category, as my travel (especially these days) is infrequent.

Alternate time periods. jdtbuchanan also mentioned this. I budget $100/month for eating lunch at work, spread over 20 work days (most months) means $5/day. But if my team and I go out for an expensive lunch, I'll hit the limit much earlier. So the spending is within my budget, but not the intent of my budget. I'd like to be able to see daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-annual/annual budget options (at least the periods below a month, budgeting for quarterly expenses with a monthly budget works, but budgeting for daily/weekly expenses doesn't work as well).

I'm not looking for a budgeting app so much as something that tracks my expenses. I don't know how much I'm going to be making each paycheck, so traditional budgeting doesn't work for me. What I'm looking for is:

- Import bank files (ofx / qfx)

- Let me flag some transactions as 'do not import'

- Ability to categorize transactions, and have it auto-categorize transactions as they're imported. This should be done by name and amount. Eg - $80 from Chevron might be Auto Fuel, but $5 from Chevron might be Snack Food.

- Ability to split transactions

- Ability to manually enter transactions. Because sometimes I pay cash

- Ability to have sub-categories. Eg: Car; Car : Fuel; Car : Maintenance; Car : Repairs; Car : Insurance;

- Ability to view spending by category by month / by year. This can either be by sub-categories, or roll sub-categories into a parent category. Be able to drill-down to get more details.

This is an aside, but there are basically two ways to do budgeting:

Forecasting (what most people think of as budgeting) where you assume some average inflow and calculate the average/target outflow for various categories for each month. This doesn't work with irregular income unless you set your outflow to below your average inflow (which may not be easy to predict for freelancers, part-time workers, or people who get tips).

Actual budgeting where you take the existing cash on hand and designate/allocate it for spending categories. I have (made up numbers) $5k on hand, I have to pay my mortgage ($1500) leaves me with $3500. I set some aside for groceries ($400) leaves me with $3100. Repeat until this month's categories are done, put any excess into the next month. Maybe I have $1k free after budgeting so I can put $1k to next month's mortgage. Then on my next paycheck I can budget the remaining $500 to that and start on other categories. At the end of this exercise, I know my money will get me through this month (or not) and how much further it'll go.

Of the two formats, the former only works if you have a regular paycheck and very little deviation in spending from month to month. The latter works very well for many more people in a variety of situations because it is based on reality.

While I use YNAB and would recommend it, there are other systems out there that do the same thing. And I've used ledger-cli for it as well (but really wanted the mobile interface and something my wife would use). You can start with either as an expense tracker, and then after a month or two (once you've tracked your spending so you know your current level) you can switch to using them as budgeting tools (YNAB does that out of the box, ledger-cli takes a bit more work).

Looks like a few people are starting to create their own budgeting apps. I've seen Lunch Money in the space for multi-currency support. I'm also building an app, using Flutter and some backend server/database, haven't decided yet. Main features I'm thinking about:

- Open source, self hostable with a paid hostable subscription option that syncs to different devices. Unfortunately one time payments don't really cut it for sustained development.

- Native performing clients for web, mobile, and desktop (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux are all supported by Flutter, but the app will not necessarily have native UI though). This can be done through Flutter which compiles ahead of time without running on a JS VM like Electron or React Native. Hopefully you should get good performance.

- On the feature side of things, rolling daily/weekly/monthly budgets, with the envelope system where you allocate a budget per day/week/month and try not to go over it. If you do, you'll have to pull from another budget. Also gonna have a way to budget for some event in the future, and split up that amount into timeperiod based increments. For example, if you estimate you want to take a 6k vacation in a year, the app would help you budget 500 a month.

- Undecided on whether it should be manual transaction entry only or whether it should integrate with banks, Venmo, and the like. Some people like one, and not the other.

- Analysis over timescales and categories. Especially annoying in Mint to mark a merchant like "AMZN" into "Amazon" and not have it propagate across all findings of the word "AMZN".

- Similar to analysis, have forecasting as to what I might spend in the future. This can be from recurring transactions, pattern recognition and the like.

- Have good splits. Other apps don't let you split money easily, if from Venmo or whatnot. If I split dinner with a friend, I don't want to see that I've spent all of it in my food budget, only that I actually spent half and my friend recompensated me.

What else would you want?

Rolling daily budgets for incidental expenses. Any budgeting tool I've used has focused on Monthly budgets. I don't find this helpful for small things like lunches out, drinks with friends, etc. If I get a notice that I've hit my budget on the 20th of the month. I'm not going to just stop doing anything social for 10 days which makes the budget kind of useless. However, if I allocate $20 each day I'm much more likely to look at the app and decide what I'm going to spend based what I've accumulated and as long as I don't end the month negative I'll be on budget.

Alert me when a bill is over a specified confidence interval.

For example, if my bill is $10/month +- $5 (std), then it will alert me if it exceeds $6.49 more than the $10/month (the 80% confidence interval.) This is useful for phone bills which can go up by a certain amount (e.g. long distance) but don't have a fixed threshold. If they're over by a few dollars for a few months then I've probably added an add-on, but there's no "fixed" amount that it should be, just that it's not too much more than it was.

Check out https://lunchmoney.app (disclaimer: I'm the founder). We have a fully customizable rules engine which we've just augmented to allow for email notifications, so you can create very specific criteria for imported transactions to be alerted on.

It hasn’t been released yet, but know that Microsoft is looking to hit this space as well with their Money app.

If you’re looking at DIY budgeters who don’t want third-party access, I’d make sure that subviews of specific goals, like a pay down chart of student loans or month-over-month of credit card bills. Since you’re manually entering information, your primary sell is probably going to be UI-based.

Do you have a link to this Money app, or perhaps a news source? I only found the older desktop version from some time age when searching Microsoft Money app.

>> Microsoft announced this past week that they are going to be releasing an app to help manage money, called Money in Excel. The new feature will be a part of Microsoft 365 and is going to mirror many of the features and qualities available in the tech giant’s Excel spreadsheets both in appearance and the way it works. With the new app, users will be able to sync their credit card and bank accounts to it in order to automatically keep track of purchases, deposits, and each accounts’ balance. Money in Excel will be able to help users identify trends and patterns in their spending along with several key components to keep users up-to-date on their accounts. (Source: Motley Fool) (Note: My company, The Marks Group PC, is a Microsoft partner).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/04/12/mi...

You should check out ynab and /r/financier

For the past 3 years, I have been using this super simple spreadsheet based on double-entry accounting

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwCamSEqPXiv0jwSobJl...

Hi, I don't use budgeting on a regular basis, but when I need it for a project or a trip I use ledger-cli.org

It isn't a "batteries included" solution, but with a little creativity it allows you to do pretty much anything you want.

If you are prepared to even build your own app, I thing it might interest you.

Good Budget is the one that I use after trying a TON of them in January this year. It was one of the few that really does the kinds of things I want.

Some things that I wish it had or did differently are:

- The progress bars should show the money that is scheduled to be used for a given bucket (probably in a different colour or something)

- It'd be nice to show a $/day remaining for a bucket, again taking into account the scheduled transactions too

- In the upcoming transactions, it should show all the upcoming repeats for a given transaction within the current budget period.. E.g. if I have something that is $100/week, the scheduled transactions only shows 1x $100 transaction. You can replicate what I want by creating 4 different transactions that repeat every 4 weeks, but thats silly :D

- I'd like a way to enter a transaction as a 'draft' very quickly via a home screen widget or even Siri or something. And then I could go in and edit it later to set the bucket it comes from etc.

- It has no good way to do long term savings - you can create a goal bucket for it but the bars etc for it become kind of meaningless.

* Offline.

* Open source.

* No telemetry sent.

* One-time fee, no 'subscription'.

* Linux-compatible.

Has anyone used lunchmoney.app?

I have, at least for the free trial amount. It didn't really stick for me, because of no mobile app so I can't add transactions on the go, and the budgets just seemed...forgiving? I want to control my spending, I don't want to be told it's okay and that I can spend more. At least for me, I want hard cut offs. It's a fine service, it just didn't work for me necessarily. I also don't use their multi-currency support as I don't travel or have multiple currencies.

Thanks for giving Lunch Money a shot! The mobile app is coming soon, but as a one-woman team, I'm focused 100% on rounding out the core product before introducing another platform and slowing down my development cycles. Cheers!

Thanks Jen, looking forward to it. I've heard about your story from IndieHackers, very inspiring, it made me want to create an app for my budgeting needs as well.

Everything that YNAB has, plus forecasting.

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