looking for a personal accounting program so I can enter my expenses and see where I spend money at end of year so I can budget

I am running into ones that load on the cloud and charge a yearly fee- are there any like Microsoft money used to be to where you load it on your computer and it just stays on your computer? Without selling your info? With no yearly fee?

Thanks in advance

You'll be hard pressed to find any software that isn't subscription based. I like YNAB

Gnucash

Pretty much all financial software has gone subscription. Heck even QuickBooks Desktop which hasn't seen any appreciable improvements in a decade now has a subscription to it. Quicken is like $49/year for what to me was pretty mediocre software. I dropped it after a year. Right now we're in the mode of spending too much money so I'd better go make more. I'll let y'all know how that works out.

I used YNAB for years (still like it) and recently switched to tiller (which I love). I tried about every option out there for OS X (or web based) and pretty much all of them are subscription based and those that weren't were typically under developed.

If you really want it to be off internet and free, just figure out how to do what you want with a spreadsheet or find some free or one time pay templates you like for a spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel

As a CPA (if that holds weight with you), I second this. I'd just roll with Excel. Just utilize multiple tabs to cover separate groups of expenses, then have them all summed up on the main tab.

If you'd like, you can swing by my office and I'd be happy to walk through it with you. Just let me know.

Been using Mint for years, pretty good. It is in the cloud though so doesn't fit that requirement.

For me, ease of use is worth it because I have so many transactions a month and 2 little kids so it's hard to find time go comb through them manually and do the data entry.

Your only real option here is to build it yourself in MS Excel and make sure cloud saving is turned off. There are basic templates it comes with and 365 sub may get you more.

Otherwise, I can't recommend Tiller enough. It's based on either Google Sheets or MS Excel - your preference although the Google path has more bells and whistles for now. They are focused this year on bringing the excel core product up to par with Google though.

I'll also drop this link to YouBet's annual thread where you can get more in depth opinions (though maybe not specifically tailored to your requirements) - it's where I learned about Tiller which led to me bailing on YNAB for the first time in 5+ years.

https://texags.com/forums/57/topics/3274749

JDCAG (NOT Colin) said:

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I'll also drop this link to YouBet's annual thread where you can get more in depth opinions (though maybe not specifically tailored to your requirements) - it's where I learned about Tiller which led to me bailing on YNAB for the first time in 5+ years.

https://texags.com/forums/57/topics/3274749

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Thanks for the plug.

Just put an update on that thread I ran across a couple of weeks ago.

Are you opposed to the cloud if it's free? Mint is popular and it's free.

Thank you all very much! We are researching the suggestions and will settle on one this week.

Again thank you all!