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)