
Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for? - beartech
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&#x27;t search enough.. budgeting apps that come to see this thread in the future, please don&#x27;t judge me :)<p>Some of them integrate with your bank account, credit card and I&#x27;m not really interested in this sort of stuff. I don&#x27;t want 3rd party apps having access to whatever my bank produces, not to mention that are hundreds of banks out there and I&#x27;d assume that making those integrations are in fact a big deal and possibly dangerous (for a security point of view).<p>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 &quot;on the go&quot; and also share it with my wife) and now I&#x27;m going to build yet another budgeting app for my needs. Nothing fancy, but just something helpful and makes me proud of.<p>If you are using a budgeting app already, what&#x27;s missing?<p>If you wish to use one, what sort of features would you look for?
======
Spivak
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.

~~~
jnfr
Hi! Founder of [https://lunchmoney.app](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!

------
jkeuhlen
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.

~~~
anotherman554
Mint.com's budget feature let's you choose to roll over money.

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

------
fishmaster
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.

~~~
kleer001
> 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.

------
alexmingoia
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.

------
jnfr
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](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](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!

~~~
beartech
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!

------
saddestcatever
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

~~~
Jtsummers
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.

------
Jtsummers
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).

------
briddums
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.

~~~
Jtsummers
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).

------
satvikpendem
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?

------
jdtbuchanan
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.

------
polygot
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.

~~~
jnfr
Check out [https://lunchmoney.app](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.

------
octokatt
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.

~~~
satvikpendem
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.

~~~
burgerzzz
>> 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...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/04/12/microsoft-
rolls-out-a-money-management-appand-other-small-business-tech-
news/#28b12e3e60d2)

------
palidanx
You should check out ynab and /r/financier

------
rawmark
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...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwCamSEqPXiv0jwSobJlj8r0EAvMTEY-
N_2OWLqpUC8/edit?usp=sharing)

------
tomwilson
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.

------
mikst
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.

------
stakkur
* Offline.

* Open source.

* No telemetry sent.

* One-time fee, no 'subscription'.

* Linux-compatible.

------
edimaudo
Has anyone used lunchmoney.app?

~~~
satvikpendem
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.

~~~
jnfr
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!

~~~
satvikpendem
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.

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deathtrader666
Everything that YNAB has, plus forecasting.

