
5 Reasons Why I Switched from Mint to a Spreadsheet - dend
https://www.dennisdel.com/why-spreadsheet/
======
osullivj
Some good points explaining why spreadsheets are so sticky. I do my books for
my limited company in Google & Excel. Points 2 & 5 are key for me: flexibility
and awareness. I tried freeagent.com a while back. Initially it seemed very
convenient, but then I had massive hassle with some double booked
transactions, so went back to spreadsheets. I do note that the author is an MS
person, so is likely to talk up Excel...

~~~
dend
Full disclosure - yes, I work at MS, but not on the Excel team, and have no
stake in Excel in any way. That said, you can substitute Excel with any other
spreadsheet processor you like :)

And I agree with you that in some cases transactions are hard to track with
existing tools when there are very specific scenarios that are simply not
common enough to be included in the "one-size-fits-all" services. For me those
are cash transactions between friends and them paying back for things through,
say, Venmo.

~~~
fleurdelotus
What about Microsoft Money?

~~~
dend
Hey, Money Plus Sunset is still an available download:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=207...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=20738)

------
saddestcatever
How are you populating your spreadsheet? Importing a .csv from each of your
bank accounts? Let's say I have 3 different accounts, logging in and getting
updated transactions is now a 15 minute process.

Mint absolutely blows (slow, barely works, poor categorization, poor
projections), but I haven't found an easier way to view multiple accounts in
one place.

~~~
dend
CSV export/import for frequent transactions, for others I just pop the Excel
spreadsheet on my phone (it's synced to Dropbox) and just roll from there.

------
zomg
Seems like a move backwards to me. I'd recommend trying YNAB (You Need A
Budget - youneedabudget.com).

~~~
dend
How do they talk to banks and what is their security policy?

I've found that they use Finicity
([https://www.finicity.com/](https://www.finicity.com/)) for API and are
stating that only a limited number of engineers have access to the DB
([https://www.youneedabudget.com/security/](https://www.youneedabudget.com/security/)).
Still, would love to know more details on the security policies and
infrastructure that are kind-of glanced over.

~~~
zomg
I intentionally don't auto-import transactions, which keeps me honest about my
spending (part of their philosophy, which I enjoy), so I haven't had a need to
look into it.

