That time of year again where I think there must be a better way than using silly spreadsheets to track how many pennies I've got (or not got, mostly).


What I currently have is an excel document with a tab for each month. Each line tracks a single debit or credit, with a date attached. Each new month is basically a copy of the previous one, with direct debits and standing orders already filled in but everything else blank. I also pre-fill a standard amount each week for food/household shopping, then revise it down to the actual receipt value when the transaction happens.  Balance is calculated on each line, and carried between tabs.



Then I've got conditional formatting that alerts if my balance goes below 0 (Yay, overdraft free!).


The main thing I like is that if I'm considering buying X, I can pop the figure into my sheet straight away it gives me an alert that in 2 weeks time I'll not have enough for a certain bill unless we eat pot noodles that week. 

Pretty basic, but fairly annoying to keep it all running and up to date, and hard to do any sensible analysis on where I'm actually spending my money.


Trouble is, every time I look at fancy pants software solutions they all seem to over complicate things and want to be more like accountancy than budget planning. And they don't (or at least, I've never managed to stick with them long enough to find) seem to do predicting future balances based on regular transactions. 

Mrs.D, a one time professional bookkeeper and tax return preparer does something very similar with an excel spreadsheet (and fucked if I understand any of it). Maybe that's as good as it gets

:(

You Need A Budget
?

Think they might have moved to a subscription price or something which might be annoying. Otherwise could be what you're after.

If it's of any help - I ran my Ltd company accounts from a (fairly complex, to be fair) Excel spreadsheet. It worked great, but I switched accountants and now I've got one of those fancy online accounting things.

Business wise it's great because things like bank reconciliation are flawless as it imports them in electronically (I.e., I don't have to go down my statement and add everything manually). It's also quite nice for past analysis and tracking, keeping HMRC happy and so on.

What it's RUBBISH for, though, is forecasting and budgeting. It was so easy to experiment with the numbers on a spreadsheet and you can take copies etc without any drama. The online one is all "real" - so if I want to run a forecasted profit & loss I can't, because it'd mean creating a made up invoice and then creating a credit note to get rid of it!

Honestly, for household stuff, I'd stick to Excel. 

So, so much :(

Even when I was earning a decent salary, I was perpetually skint and struggling to meet bills. Because a) I am absolutely awful with money and b) was, then at least, drinking far, far too much.

I've just finished doing an excel based budget for next month. I'm starting a new job on the 10th (yay!), having been out of work since graduating last year (boo!), and no matter what fancy formatting I try I can't make all the numbers look nice :(

The main issue really is that employers expect you to work for a month and then be paid, where as child care providers expect to be paid for a month and then do the work.

>>Honestly, for household stuff, I'd stick to Excel.

... is pretty much the conclusion I always seem to end up at when ever I look at this stuff. Yet I live in hope that someone might, one day, create a decent software package for this. Ideally with a desktop & mobile client, perhaps linked through your own dropbox account or similar so you can CHECK YOUR FINANCES ON THE TRAIN  B-)

WRITE THE NEXT KILLER APP. YES, YOU!

Think I'll do a spreadsheet :((

wait no.

I mean the piece of software called You Need A Budget.

As in, that's it. That's the thing. It probably doesn't do much your Excel sheet doesn't but it might be a tidier more automated way. They also have loads of little advice videos and stuff. There's a mobile app and I think it syncs through dropbox and everything.

edit: https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/ $50 a year though! I bought the previous version for about £10 on a Steam sale, though that obviously doesn't get the updates.

Fuck me. I was even looking at that earlier last night. I blame sleep deprivation and lurgy (fail)